One thing I always want to tell people about commit messages: There’s no length limit. In fact, write as much as you can. Go crazy. Write some more. Explain.

One thing I always want to tell people about commit messages: There’s no length limit. In fact, write as much as you can. Go crazy. Write some more. Explain. Talk about how your day went. Tell us how you found the problem. Put benchmarks that show why your change makes things faster. Show the stack trace or test output that you’re fixing. Quote other people. Put an email chain in the commit message. In a well-curated commit history, commit messages become source-level documentation available via an annotate/blame operation. Most people hate writing documentation, but commit messages are about the only time when our tools force us to write something. Take this opportunity to really write something. It’s the only time when writing is really required in any way. There’s no need for a length limit because most of the time the commit messages are hidden away, and most interfaces will hide the full commit message anyway (or can easily be configured to do so). If you want practice jamming lots of information into a small amount of space, that’s what the first line of the commit message is, but after that, don’t feel constrained by length limits. These are examples of my favourite kind of commits: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/4fb2bb61597c?style=gitweb https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/4fb2bb61597c?style... https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/ed5b25874d99 https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/ed5b25874d99 https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/1423ff45c322 https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/1423ff45c322 https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/dd028bca9221 https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/dd028bca9221 https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/8d5584d8345b https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/8d5584d8345b