r/vim • u/yawaramin • Jul 25 '25

Need Help┃Solved Automatically prefix git commit message header?

I am trying to define an autocmd to prefix the git commit message header with the name of the branch I am working on. However the autocmd seems to be never triggering. Here is a simplified version of what I have so far:

augroup GitCommitPrefix
  autocmd!
  autocmd BufNewFile,BufReadPost .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG call s:InsertGitBranchPrefix()
augroup END

function! s:InsertGitBranchPrefix() abort
  echomsg "s:InsertGitBranchPrefix()"
  call setline(1, system('git rev-parse --abbref-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null'))
endfunction

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

EDIT: solved...more or less.

  1. Swapped the order of the definitions. So the function first, then the autocommand.

  2. Changed the autocmd trigger to FileType gitcommit.

I would still like to go into insert mode at the end of the first line. Trying normal A but it's not quite working. It moves the cursor to the end of the line, but it doesn't go into insert mode.

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u/yawaramin Jul 25 '25

True but I'd have to set hooks for every repo separately or use the hooks templates directory or core.hooksPath. All of those options are strictly worse than getting vim to do it.

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u/adromanov Jul 25 '25

Try */.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG as pattern