gitlogger Improved

Jun 13th, 2013

I use Brett Terpstra’s little Ruby script called “gitlogger” to write git commit messages from selected repositories into my Day One journal once a day.

My commit messages tend to be a bit longer when I work on projects which really matter. Unfortunately, gitlogger wasn’t intended to handle multi-line commit messages. Every commit message resides in a list item. But if you know Markdown, you’ll know this markup won’t render as expected:

Git Log 2013-06-13:

* **[imprTheme]** 15:41: adds pingback template (59c2959)
- pingbacks at the bottom have another list
- ... take up less space
- ... are in blockquotes

* **[imprTheme]** 15:32: deletes .min.css on cleanup (6137ad4)

The list of commit messages won’t contain two items but six, because the sub-list isn’t recognized as such. It has to be indented by four spaces to create a nested list. Expected output would be:

Git Log 2013-06-13:

*   **[imprTheme]** 15:41: adds pingback template (59c2959)
    - pingbacks at the bottom have another list
    - ... take up less space
    - ... are in blockquotes

*   **[imprTheme]** 15:32: deletes .min.css on cleanup (6137ad4)

I just got upset enough with my git commit messages being rendered poorly in Day One to finally change Brett’s script (at rev. 5). Now every message is indented in a Markdown-friendly way.

For installation instructions, see Brett’s original post.