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Comment by GaggiX | Hacker News Reader

The names given to the commits are... peculiar.

SCM as Save Button.

Tbh I’m (loosely) following commit message best practices in all of my projects out of irrational fear of being viewed as unprofessional. But never needed that effing prose in my workflow. Maybe a keyword from time to time. I’m using code, not messages to navigate history, and in a rare occasion. If all my messages turned into “i” I’d lose nothing, because all rationales and essentials are in code comments. I’d better seen dates (and related grouping) in a log by default and looked for a commit by some grepping patch contents rather than messages.

On several occasions I've found that act of composing the commit message brings something to the front of my mind that I really ought to get into the patch but haven't done yet.

Otherwise the main use case I have for a commit message is that it fills out the GitHub PR for me with something useful.

Commit comments are how you find code diffs.

Focus on what/why in your commit messages.

If you can’t articulate that in your commit messages, I can almost guarantee you’re thinking deeply enough about your code changes.

I appreciate advices, but I believe this one is not on point I expressed, as it only reiterates on a premise that I follow already but find mostly useless irl.

I’ve been writing software for 30 years, and have often worked on OS code bases with revision history that extends back to the 1970s.

Your style of commit message is a crime against the future. It makes it impossible for a future developer to understand why you did something or what you were thinking.

The commit contents can tell you what changed, but it can never tell you why it was changed, what the authors thoughts were, what corner cases they took into account, whether it was a temporary workaround for something that's no longer a problem...

(unless of course the author is a stickler for inline comments, which I also approve of)

I mean… I try and include some intent in my commits, and online comments.

(Just an anecdote about my personal projects)

I often switch between different ideas/features/projects in the same repo, and I like rebasing between different chains of thought. For me, the messages are more like a memorable phrase. I also prepend them with a keyword for the overall project so I don't need a long dev branch, which has surprisingly been useful once or twice.

Otherwise, not really useful for me. I mostly just `git add -u && git commit --amend --no-edit`.

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