Start a Git commit message with a hashmark (#)

Question

Git treats lines starting with # as comment lines when committing. This is very annoying when working with a ticket tracking system, and trying to write the ticket number at the beginning of the line, e.g.

#123 salt hashed passwords

Git will simply remove the line from the commit message. Is there a way to escape the hash? I tried \ and !, but nothing works. Whitespace before # is preserved, so that's not a working solution to the problem either.

Solution 1

This behaviour is part of git commit's default 'clean-up' behaviour. If you want to keep lines starting with # you can use an alternative clean-up mode.

E.g.

git commit --cleanup=whitespace

If you do this you have to be careful to remove all # lines that you don't want to appear in the commit.

Solution 2

Note that, since git1.8.2 (February 2013), you can use a different character than '#' for the commented line in the commit message.

That allows you to use '#' for your bug number reference.

Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default.

The core.commentChar configuration variable can be used to customize this '#' to a different character.

---

In theory, you could put a core.commentChar word (multiple characters), but git 2.0.x/2.1 will be stricter (Q3 2014).

See commit 50b54fd by Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy (pclouds):

config: be strict on core.commentChar

We don't support comment strings (at least not yet). And multi-byte character encoding could also be misinterpreted.

The test with two commas is updated because it violates this. It's added with the patch that introduces core.commentChar in eff80a9 (Allow custom "comment char" - 2013-01-16). It's not clear to me why that behavior is wanted.

---

git 2.0.x/2.1 (Q3 2014) will add an automatic selection for core.commentChar:
See commit 84c9dc2

When core.commentChar is "auto", the comment char starts with '#' as in default but if it's already in the prepared message, find another char in a small subset. This should stop surprises because git strips some lines unexpectedly.

Note that git is not smart enough to recognize '#' as the comment char in custom templates and convert it if the final comment char is different.
It thinks '#' lines in custom templates as part of the commit message. So don't use this with custom templates.

The list of candidate characters for "auto" are:

# ; @ ! $ % ^ & | :

That means a command like git commit -m '#1 fixed issue' will automatically switch the commentChar to ';', because '#' was used in the commit message.

Solution 3

Answers here are good and detailed, but for a git noob like me customizing git config options isn't so obvious. Here is an example to change from # to ; for comment characters:

git config core.commentChar ";"

That's all you need to do.

Solution 4

You can use the command line option -m:

git commit -m "#123 fixed"

Solution 5

If you're doing an interactive rebase, then when you save your commit message with nothing in it (because the # at the beginning has made it a comment and therefore it's been ignored) git will show you what to do:

Aborting commit due to empty commit message.
Could not amend commit after successfully picking 5e9159d9ce3a5c3c87a4fb7932fda4e53c7891db... 123 salt hashed passwords
This is most likely due to an empty commit message, or the pre-commit hook
failed. If the pre-commit hook failed, you may need to resolve the issue before
you are able to reword the commit.
You can amend the commit now, with

        git commit --amend

Once you are satisfied with your changes, run

        git rebase --continue

So, just amend the message:

git commit --amend -m "#123 salt hashed passwords"

and continue the rebase:

git rebase --continue

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