How to Commit Multiline Messages in git commit

As developers, when using Git to commit code to a remote repository, we need to write information about this modification. On the command line, we use the git commit command, such as git commit -m which allows you to add a line of information. But sometimes a multi-line message with a title and a specific description may be more indicative of your intent, such as the following:

Commit Title: Briefly describe what I changed
Commit Description: Detailed instructions for changing it

So how to achieve this?

---

1. Use a text editor

Use git commit without the -m or git commit -v, which will take you to a text editor. So then you can add multiple lines of text using your favorite text editor.

2. Multiple -m options

If you don’t want to see wordy diffs, you can use multiple -m options. Just like this:

$ git commit -m "Commit Title" -m "Commit Description"

This is because if multiple -m options are given, their values will be concatenated into separate paragraphs, which can be found in the git documentation.

Next git log will look like this:

$ git log
commit 1e8ec2c4e820fbf8045b1c7af9f1f4f23262f755
Author: Your Name [e-mail]
Date: Sat Sep 24 20:18:15 2022 -0700

Commit Title

Commit Description

3. Open quotes, press Enter

Another easier way is to type git commit -m " and hit Enter to enter the multiline, and use closing quotes when closing. This looks like this:

$ git commit -m "
> Commit Title
> Commit Description"

Next git log will look like this:

$ git log
commit 7d75a73e41b578a1e2130372a88a20ed1a0a81e4
Author: Your Name [e-mail]
Date: Sat Sep 24 20:22:02 2022 -0700

Commit Title
    Commit Description

4. Shell Environment Variables

Don’t forget that you can define environment variables in the shell, for example, you can define temporary environment variables with newlines:

$ msg="
> Commit Title
> Commit Description"

# or
$ msg="$(printf "Commit Title\nCommit Description")"

Next, you can:

$ git commit -m "$msg"

That’s it, git log will output:

$ git log
commit 056e35c37d199c0f3904e47d2107140267608c4a
Author: Your Name [e-mail]
Date: Sat Sep 24 20:42:11 2022 -0700

Commit Title
    Commit Description

5. Use the -F option

Introduction from the documentation:

-F

 — file=
Take the commit message from the given file. Use - to read the message from the standard input.

So you can write a multi-line message in a temporary file before committing. Like the following:

$ printf "Commit Title\nCommit Description" > "temp.txt"
$ git commit -F "temp.txt"

Or use standard input instead of temporary files:

$ printf "Commit Title\nCommit Description" | git commit -F-

Conclusion

Here are a few methods I saw, you can choose one of them according to your preference. If you have other ways, feel free to share.

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Comments

[cerico]

You can extend these by making a shell alias or aliases, that auto-prepends semantic versioning (fix, feat, feat!)

I use

fix () {
    echo "#fix: $1" > ~/.config/git/commit-msg-template
    git commit
}

minor () {
    echo "#feat: $1" > ~/.config/git/commit-msg-template
    git commit
}

though you could alse combine into one function too. Then you can run as eg

minor "increased client_max_body_size in nginx"

This will open up the text editor, whereupon you delete the # so that the message has changed, and either save if you want a one line commit, or add the rest of the multiline commit before saving. It also means all your commits are prefixed by default

[Capte]

Cool