I finally caught up with the git commit message best practice.
Linus’ rants about GitHub commit / pull request quality (example) helped a lot.
He’s harsh but right - look at the kernel commit messages with git log. It’s awesome.
I also found an older post from tpope (catching up, like I said) that deals with best practice for commit messages.
If you’re like me, you use vim to write commit messages and there is a quick win to write better messages starting today!
Just add
+au FileType gitcommit set tw=72
to your .vimrc and you’re set! This will wrap lines at 72 characters when writing files of type gitcommit.