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I do love the social history of good commit messages, and what they teach us about the process of what we do.

I will offer one nit here, which is that I always start my commit messages with one-line summaries; this makes it really easy to scan commits (and git is tooled to do this!)

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I don't understand your nit: is it that you don't see a one-line summary (which exists: "Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error") or that you don't feel it correctly summarizes the change?

It doesn’t summarize the intention of the changes, but it does summarize a bunch of stuff already in front of you when you’re looking at a diff...

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Remove non-ascii character to fix error from `bundle exec rake`

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That commit message would add external context (what was broken/where the error was coming from) and intent

That's a good one. I do the same in code documentation. One line to very briefly summarize what that function/module does, <enter><enter>, followed by a more detailed description.

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