Git, read latest commit message when committing

Question

When I am committing, this text jumps up:

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

 On branch master
 Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.

 Changes to be committed:

    new file:   modules/new_file.txt

What I want is to let this informative text also show me the message of my last commit, without me needing to go through git log, git show or anything similar.

E.g.

(...)

 Changes to be committed:

    new file:   modules/new_file.txt

 Previous commit message:
    [FIX] Fixed the foo.bar module

This is exactly the same as this question, but none of the answers was actually answering the question, so I guess OP just asked it a bit wrong?

Answer 1

There is a git hook called prepare-commit-msg which is what generates this commit message template. There should be a prepare-commit-msg.sample file in your .git directory by default. Rename it to remove the .sample and then edit it to include a git log -1 or anything else you might want and you'll get it when you commit.

Something like this

#!/bin/sh

echo "# Previous commit:" >> $1
git log -1 -p|sed 's/^\(.\)/# \1/g'  >> $1

should be enough.

Answer 2

You could write your own command? It might look something like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Last commit message:"
git log -1 --pretty=%B # only echo commit msg to console
echo "Enter commit message:"
read commitmsg # let user enter a commit message
git commit -m "$commitmsg"

You would then add this file to your PATH.