What's your go to commit message for a large group of changes that encompasses a variety of features?

Mine is "Major Improvement"

I try to avoid these if I can, I make small, almost atomic commits

When merging they're squashed anyway so it doesn't clutter the git history

@LotsOfCaffeine This ^^^

I'll go through the list and commit series of files for each feature, or at least break it down a bit, so if it's a big commit with four features... now it's four commits with a commit message for each with roughly the right files for each. (Of course sometimes separating them is impossible)

I like to try to do a commit, then fill out an invoice/timeslip, that way if anybody questions the hours I can just point them to the commit. Like here's where I committed 350 lines of code for X feature at 11:21, and here's where I billed you for it at 11:30. Hard to argue against.

Several commits.

I agree that making small commits is always helpful. But occasionally I would code for several hours in a single flow that it slips my mind to commit work. @LotsOfCaffeine

@-devpool- message can be multiline you know... Just make a list of changes

@iiii I guess it's easier to write list based commit messages using an IDE than terminal.

@-devpool- wait, doesn't git open a terminal editor for submitting a message?

@iiii It can but I directly use
git commit -m "My unworthy commit message"

@-devpool- Do you know about git add -p?

@sbiewald I did not. Just checked. Looks awesome and sth I would definitely use for better commit history.
Thanks!

@-devpool- during prototyping I do the same yeah, but when I work on code that already exists I try to be clear about what I intended to do with my changes

@-devpool- In the case where you don't use -e when running git commit you can simply add several -m "..." which end up in adding all of them line by line (it's easier to use the -e flag tho unless you use Commitizen or OCTO).

"some things work, some things doesn't"

"List of changes found in changelog for version X"

Changelogs are much more useful to me than git commit history

Mine is "progress". I used "minor improvements" in the past, but the new one is 10 characters shorter :]

Whatchumean my "go to" commit message?! I'm not THAT evil...

just include a line of "see code for changes, don't ask me in the pantry."