Honestly I think the best thing you can do towards making good commits is having a good GUI client and using it well. What I do is, after I'm done making a mes

Honestly I think the best thing you can do towards making good commits is having a good GUI client and using it well. What I do is, after I'm done making a mess of things, I click through each new/changed file and study the diff. I might need to commit or discard or edit specific chunks, but at the end everything is staged. Then I can click through the staged files quickly to check for mistakes while formulating a good commit message. (You could also use DIFF=vimdiff or something too) I find looking at individual hunks and files and staging them piecewise makes it much easier to maintain an attention to detail than doing a 'git diff' where everything flows together and 'git commit -a' where you might miss untracked or temporary files.