Git commit basics: line wrapping and 50/72 rule

[AlexDaniel]

Zed should help writing commit messages that follow these rules:

• Commit title should be 50 characters or less
• After the title there is an empty line
• The rest of the text is wrapped at 72 characters

This is discussed in many places around the internet, some examples:

• https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html
• Add support for AR5BBU22 [0489:e03c] torvalds/linux#17 (comment)

Emacs magit does this by default:

Notice how:

• the title text beyond 50 characters is highlighted in red
• if you forget to include an empty line after the title, it is also highlighted in red
• the rest of the text is wrapped at 72 characters

One “soft” way to allow this is to enable wrap guides in the commit messages (this doesn't work right now). The config might look like this:

  "Git Commit": {
    "wrap_guides": [50, 72]
  },

This way, the user will be able to set the guides themselves if they want to. However, I'd recommend highlighting the “wrong” parts of the commit message in red by default, as this is a relatively widespread convention which the user can bypass if they want to.

Note that, currently, writing a message that follows these rules is quite difficult in zed. The editor doesn't even show the cursor position or any other indication of how long your lines are. This forces me to write the commit outside of zed (somewhere where you can at least see how long your lines are), which is rather unfortunate.

[AlexDaniel]

In case somebody is coming back to this thread to see if there's any progress, check this: #26346 (comment)

I'm now pretty happy using Zed as GIT_EDITOR instead of relying on additional commit functionality.

[dunkmann00]

I still agree with your original suggestion that having the functionality you describe of providing feedback when you don't format the message in the "recommended" way would be great.

Another interesting approach might be to have format_on_save functionality for commit messages.

[NoTuxNoBux]

It would be nice to also have rulers or a counter in the new Git Panel. I'm currently simulating it by making it just wide enough to wrap on 72 characters, but then I can't read paths in the stage view if they are long.

[AlexDaniel]

Check out this comment: #26346 (comment)
You can still stage files in any way you want, and running git commit can be configured to open zed -w instead. Then you can add this to your zed config:

    "Git Commit": {
      "wrap_guides": [50, 72],
      "preferred_line_length": 72
    },

And you'll get the wrap guides and auto wrapping of text. IMO this is how they should've implemented it in the first place. I've been using it for months now.

[NoTuxNoBux]

Thanks for the tip. I'm aware, but would really like to use the new graphical Zed Git Panel to do my commits 😉 .

It would also work great for me if the "Git Commit" wrap_guides you propose work for the graphical Git Panel as well, but they aren't used there yet, it seems; only in the editor itself when it has language 'Git Commit' set: