On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 10:19:34AM -0400, John J Foerch wrote: > The feature would be a command line option for git commit that would > automatically prepend the "<filename>: " to the commit message. The > different cases of its behavior could be: > > - commit affecting a single file, with commit message given by -m: > > : prepend "<filename>: " to the message given by -m > > - commit affecting a single file, with commit message from editor: > > : pre-fill commit message template with "<filename>: " > > - commit affecting multiple files: > > : use common base directory of all affected files for <filename>, behaviors as above for use with -m or editor. > > Anybody think that this or something like it would be a good convenience? Johannes already pointed you to the prepare-commit-msg hook, which I think is the right solution. I wrote a rough sketch for fun (note that you could write it in whatever language you like if the mix of perl/shell isn't to your liking): -- >8 -- #!/bin/sh # only kick in for vanilla commit, or "-m" case "$2" in ""|message) ;; *) exit 0 esac # common prefix of all changed files prefix=$( git diff-index --name-only HEAD | perl -lne ' if (!defined $prefix) { $prefix = $_; } else { chop $prefix while !/^\Q$prefix\E/; } END { # trim trailing slash if present $prefix =~ s{/$}{}; print $prefix } ' ) # now stick the prefix at the start of the message-in-progress { printf '%s' "$prefix: " cat "$1" } >"$1".tmp && mv "$1".tmp "$1"