Commit message style guide for Git The first line of a commit message serves as a summary. When displayed on the web, it's often styled as a heading, and in emails, it's typically used as the subject. As such, you should capitalize it and omit any trailing punctuation. Aim for about 50 characters, give or take, otherwise it may be painfully truncated in some contexts. Write it, along with the rest of your message, in the imperative tense: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug" or "Fixes bug". Consistent wording makes it easier to mentally process a list of commits. Oftentimes a subject by itself is sufficient. When it's not, add a blank line (this is important) followed by one or more paragraphs hard wrapped to 72 characters. Git is strongly opinionated that the author is responsible for line breaks; if you omit them, command line tooling will show it as one extremely long unwrapped line. Fortunately, most text editors are capable of automating this. :q