this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
9 points (100.0% liked)

Git

4652 readers
4 users here now

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Resources

Rules

  1. Follow programming.dev rules
  2. Be excellent to each other, no hostility towards users for any reason
  3. No spam of tools/companies/advertisements. It’s OK to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the community should not be self-promotion.

Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Whenever I do a git revert I go into an edit session with the following pre-filled.

Revert "wip: does this work?"

This reverts commit ad21a2ae23166b3f3cddoooooooom94821e3cdb4.

# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
...

...and so on.

I like to use conventional commits, so I change this to revert: "wip: does this work?".

Is there a way to get the initial template for the revert commit message to appear this way by default? Lowercase, and with a colon.


UPDATE This is what I came up with

#!/bin/bash

COMMIT_MSG_FILE=$1

old_subject_line=$(head -1 $COMMIT_MSG_FILE)

# Not a revert
if [[ ! "$old_subject_line" =~ ^Revert\ \" ]]
then
    exit 0
fi

new_subject_line=$(echo $old_subject_line|sed 's/^Revert/revert:/')

sed -i "1s/.*/$new_subject_line/" $COMMIT_MSG_FILE

Curiously, the case where two "Reverts" in a row become a "Reapply" doesn't come up like I thought it would. Maybe it only happens if you use the default Revert "yada yada yada" subject line.

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for the 2am nerd snipe :D

You can do this via git hooks and a script. Specifically the prepare-commit-msg hook (.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg). In your script, check for the GIT_REFLOG_ACTION env variable, and check if its value is "revert". If so, you are in a revert, and you can echo/printf out whatever you would like in your template.

Might be a bit more work to get to where you want, but hopefully that points you in the right direction?

[–] duckduckduck@programming.dev 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Thanks that is a great start, and even better gives me an excuse to faff about with scripting. I'll share what I come up with!

EDIT Oh interesting, in my debugging I found out that if you revert a revert now (git version 2.43.0) that the subject line reads "Reapply" instead of "Revert "Revert "..."""

[–] duckduckduck@programming.dev 4 points 5 days ago

And yeah I made an account just to ask this question. Hello! Nice looking server you've got here. 🖐