Add indicator when a line in a commit message exceeds 72 characters #3112

Like https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github/issues/2944 showed, people don't like to be limited.

It's a good idea to keep a short title simply because the title needs to be scannable and appear in one line. This doesn't apply to the commit message.

Manual wrapping is counterproductive to anyone with monitors that can display more than 80 columns

Manual wrapping is counterproductive to anyone with monitors that can display more than 80 columns

This is excellently demonstrated by your own link, where pre-formatted 72-chars become clipped/scrollable whereas the regular, auto-wrapped content just fills the page:

I'm not suggesting that this should force users to adhere to a 72 character line width, but rather to make it easier to detect and adhere to it if you prefer. This is a fairly common practice and is the default behavior when using vim with git commit. Here's another link about writing git commit messages that is used as a reference for many: https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/#wrap-72

I definitely understand your point about wrapping based on the screen width. However, I often use git in a terminal that spans the full width of my monitor and I don't want the commit messages to span the full width when I run git log as it makes them extremely difficult to read.

It looks like there's also a good discussion about this at https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/62.

There's no super-easy way to detect where the text wraps in the browser, especially in textareas. The closest thing I can think of is to calculate the content height (via the fit-textareas feature) and compare it to the amount of \n characters, but even then the message would be _"Your message is being soft-wrapped somewhere, but who knows on which line"

Additionally I don't think it's particularly useful for most people, so I'll close this for now

What about doing something like this suggestion:

My 2 cents, line length indicator would be enough. Possibly faint grey to give the impression that it's a guide and not necessarily a hard rule. On hard-wrapping, I find it idealistic ... in the sense that not everything can be hard-wrapped e.g. a long URL.

I don't know very much about what's possible for RGH to detect or even modify. I'm an Android developer and don't have much web experience. However, I assume you could get the text, split on \n characters, and then count the number of characters in each line. Some ideas:

• Change the color of the characters after 72 to be a different color (such as light gray).
• If possible, draw a light gray vertical line at the 72 character mark.

I totally understand the useful for most people stance and I read that before submitting the idea. I don't have any hard statistics to back it up, but I would argue that there's precedent that this is useful to most people (as seen by the articles on the topic and the discussion at https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/62). I'm definitely not arguing that it's clearly useful for most people (it's not clear whether it is or isn't). However, I was trying to suggest it in such a way that it would be extremely useful for those who do prefer to wrap at 72 characters, while not being a burden for those who don't.

Just for reference, my current process is to start writing my commit message, copy it into a character counter to find where the first line exceeds 72 characters, insert a \n, then copy it back and use the first line as a reference for the rest of the message.

However, I assume you could get the text, split on \n characters, and then count the number of characters in each line.

True. I think you could go one step further and automatically add linebreaks once the line reaches 72 characters, but then again this would have to be its own extension or userscript. Probably one already exists

If anyone finds such an extension or user script, I'd be very interested! 🙂

I would be as well! At the moment I just copy 72 characters into the textbox and align the text to that. So far I've only accidentally committed the string of 72 characters a couple of times and then had to force-push to fix it. :man_facepalming: I'd really appreciate a better way to visualize it!

Yeah, I have the same problem. My suggestion could be a shortcut/button that would wrap the text just before you want to submit it.