View older failed commit messages

Question

If a git commit fails, the commit message can be recovered from the .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG file. This file gets overwritten by the last commit message that is attempted. Is there a way to view a failed commit message that was used before the last one?

Answer 1

Not natively with Git. You would have to setup an external process which:

• would detect any changes in that file
• save it with a differ name

But you would review those past commit messages on your own.

This answer mentions the possibility to reuse past commit message with:

git commit --reuse-message=head@{1}

That isn't exactly what you want (in term of message of "past failed commits", but is the only native git way I know of using past commit messages.