These are fantastic questions! I can’t stress enough how important it is to spend some time writing a good commit message.

Now, what makes a “good” commit message? That’s a great question and has been written about a number of times. Here are some important things to think about when crafting a good commit message:

Do

• do keep the message short (less than 60-ish characters)
• do explain what the commit does (not how or why!)
• do use present time in your messages
• do remove unnecessary punctuation marks
• do use small case
• do make a single commit for single change (even really small)
• do point out the path to the file, if it’s not obvious which one has been changed by the commit.

Do not

• do not explain why the changes are made (more on this below)
• do not explain how the changes are made (that’s what git log -p is for!)
• do not use the word “and”if you have to use “and”, your commit message is probably doing too many changes - break the changes into separate commitse.g. “make the background color pink and increase the size of the sidebar”
• do not use dates, name and other inappropriate marks

The best way that I’ve found to come up with a commit message is to finish this phrase, “This commit will…“. However, you finish that phrase, use that as your commit message.

If you need to explain why a change is being made or how does it address the issue?

You can add a blank line, separating the commit message from description.

When you’re writing the commit message, the first line is the message itself. After the message, leave a blank line, and then type out the body or explanation including details about why the commit is needed (e.g. URL links).

Git is smart enough to distinguish the first line of your commit message as your summary. In fact, if you try *git shortlog*, instead of *git log*, you will see a long list of commit messages, consisting of the id of the commit, and the summary only.

Further paragraphs come after blank lines.

• Bullet points are okay, too.
• Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, followed by a single space. Use a hanging indent.

Here’s what a commit message edit screen might look like: