Git - Automatically insert line breaks in git commit messages

[stkb]

I'm trying to get into the habit of writing good commit messages. Not sure if this should be the default but it would be really useful if vscode automatically wrapped commit message lines at say 80 chars and inserted line breaks.

I don't mean changing the appearance of the text in the commit message box, just before it's actually committed. The line length could be in an option too.

[joaomoreno]

How about a little UI that would tell you that some lines are over 80 characters, and you'd format them yourself? Would that work?

[stkb]

@joaomoreno Maybe, and actually that was my first thought, though these points came to mind:

• It might be difficult to do without cluttering up the currently nice and clean UI
• It might look weird/be difficult to format the text given that the comment box uses a variable width and not a monospaced font.
• If it was on by default, some people might not like in it a "I don't care/stop telling me what to do" kind of way.
• Having the wrapping done automatically is easier for you than having to do it manually anyway, and in special cases where you need to do it manually you can still do so.

Overall I felt that just inserting hard line breaks before committing would be easier, though it does mean writing or finding the code to do the word-wrapping (not sure what the policy is on using external js libraries). There could be a setting something like "git.commentLineLength" with a default 0 (no word wrap) so no-one gets any unexpected behavior.

In any case if it's wanted it is something I'm prepared to work on.

[joaomoreno]

Good points.

As for the UI, I was thinking something like what you get when you try to rename a file to / in the explorer. I would't use the red color but something smoother, that doesn't sound such a big alarm. I would also put it behind an enablement setting.

I would like to stay away from automatic wrapping, since it might not do what the user intends to do. Also, we'd have to make it work for non-latin languages too: Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc. Not a trivial task.

There's a double edge sword in automatic wrapping: turning it on by default would be transparent to the user and, if the outcome is not desirable, he will only detect that when it's too late, probably when the commit was pushed to his server. If we set it off by default, we risk that no one will find and/or use it.

What do you think?

[stkb]

This is an effect used in Github Desktop, as well as elsewhere.

Although here the effect is a bit too subtle; I find it a bit difficult to see the limit. In Twitter it's much more visible.

Something between the two would be really neat, and maybe with the right balance it could be on by default.

However I don't know if the edit box is capable of that kind of rich text, so failing that, yeah the popup that comes up when entering an invalid filename is also nice and that would be ok (as you say, in a less flashy color).

[arirawr]

@joaomoreno Anyone working on this? I'm happy to give it a look.

[joaomoreno]

Actually we already have this:

[nomicos]

@joaomoreno That is a tooltip addressing the first line of the commit message. But I think the proposal described in this issue was about having Visual Studio Code automatically wrap the commit message body to 72 characters per line (the 50/72 convention). In that case, the user's only worry would be the message itself, with VSC wrapping it right after they click 'Commit' and before the actual commit is made.