I quite envy a nice commit message. The Rails project has rules about commit messages that are tops. This is a great example from a great developer I know, which got merged into core. So now on my own projects I have cribbed, tweaked, and automated a tiny bit of of that sweet, sweet commit message honey. Naming your branch Step 1 I name my branches with a prefix that is one of: “hotfix”, “bug”, “feature”, or “candy”.