Commit Editor

An opinionated, terminal-based text editor for git commit messages, built with Textual.

• Title length warning: Characters beyond position 50 on the first line are highlighted in red
• Auto-wrap body text: Lines in the commit body (line 3+) are automatically wrapped at 72 characters (except for long strings that can't be wrapped, such as URLs)
• White space: Trailing white space is automatically stripped when a file is saved; an empty newline is inserted at the end of the file if not present.
• Signed-off-by toggle: Quickly add or remove a Signed-off-by trailer with a keyboard shortcut
• Issue ID validation: Optionally enforce that commit titles start with an issue ID (e.g. PROJ-123:)
• Status bar: Shows current cursor position (line/column) and title length with warnings

Installation

# Using uv
uv tool install commit-editor

# Using pip
pip install commit-editor

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or later
• Git (for Signed-off-by functionality)

Usage

Configure commit-editor as your default git commit message editor:

git config --global core.editor commit-editor

When you run git commit, the editor will open automatically.

commit-editor can also be used as a standalone tool with:

commit-editor path/to/file.txt

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S	Save the file
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Ctrl+O	Toggle Signed-off-by trailer

Additional key bindings are noted in the Textual TextArea documentation.

Configuration

Issue ID Validation

You can require commit titles to start with an issue ID by setting a regex pattern:

# Per-repository
git config commit-editor.issue-pattern 'PROJ-\d+'

# Global
git config --global commit-editor.issue-pattern 'PROJ-\d+'

The pattern is matched against the start of the title and must be followed by a colon (:). For example, with the pattern PROJ-\d+:

• valid: PROJ-123: fix login bug
• invalid: fix login bug

Commit Message Format

This editor enforces the widely-accepted git commit message conventions:

1. Title (line 1): Should be 50 characters or less; characters beyond 50 are highlighted in red as a warning.
2. Blank line (line 2): Separates the title from the body.
3. Body (line 3+): Should wrap at 72 characters; long lines are wrapped automatically as you type.

Future Improvements

• Color theme support

License

MIT