Magit's Killer Feature #1: Commit Text Completion Based on the Diff
I’m using the Emacs git frontend (‘porcelain’) Magit for all my projects nowadays. I fire up GitUp (which is great) only to traverse the commit history visually.
Here’s one of the reasons:
With auto-completion framework company
, I get completion suggestions when I type my commit message. These are based on the actual code diff of the commit.
That means when I introduce veryLongAndCumbersomeToTypeAttributeName
, I can begin craft my commit message by typing this:
Introduce new attribute ver|
And company
will suggest an auto-completion candidate veryLongAndCumbersomeToTypeAttributeName
for the “ver
” I’ve just typed.
That makes talking about the classes and attributes and functions that were modified or introduced in a commit so much simpler. No more copy and paste, no more typing mistakes.
“Acktshually, that’s not a Magit feature!”, someone might point out without being asked, thankyouverymuch, but that’s only part of the truth: Yes it’s 100% dependent on company
being enabled to suggest completion candidates like this for me, but company
wouldn’t suggest anything if Magit didn’t display the commit message next to the code diff!