git-slum is a Bash script that takes the output of git diff --name-status and converts it to a one-line summary of the file operations, akin to the default commit subjects provided when making changes on GitHub.
The script as written depends on at least one Bash-4-ism: to use it in an environment with an older version of Bash (ie. macOS), you'll either need to rewrite this script, or install a newer version of Bash (eg. via MacPorts or Homebrew).
git config alias.autocommit '!git commit -am "$(git-slum HEAD)"'You can clean up bad placeholder commit messages by pasting exec lines amending them to the todo list in git rebase -i:
pick d703f1559614cce741d9107086fc0f608feb6fa3 Create main loop & timing control
pick 5ededd319c78363702166e845168ad8258b52ee0 adkfjslkdfjsdklfj
exec git commit --amend -m "$(git-slum HEAD^ HEAD)"
pick 960570b166db94c6fcd32de11225ebc81dadd4d8 Enable config file parsing
pick e3e578ecdcd6eefe994f6e54714bc03c270f911a Misc bugfixes
pick 1f1732d2ce193b0f740a84e553b848394a59a055 Code additions/edits
pick 09ce7c329d0550c5869d56ad24d055707920196e my hands are typing words
exec git commit --amend -m "$(git-slum HEAD^ HEAD)"
pick 74bc87f478fc36bea78813de7a587a16f131a6b5 haaaaaaaaands
x git commit --amend -m "$(git-slum HEAD^ HEAD)"
pick fb77b6cf301971fca1b841b3744ee85e9b37a736 Crib from https://xkcd.com/1296/
(That said, commits like these are generally better squashed away altogether - you may want to take a look at the --squash and --fixup options to git commit.)
Q: WOW!! This looks really helpful!!! Should I use this in all my projects everywhere I'm going to use it everywhere!!!!!!!
No. Write actual commit messages. There's a reason Git doesn't have a convenient shorthand for the --allow-empty-message argument. A history that's just the diff statistics without a description of the actual change means you have to do a lot more work to understand anything that's going on inside those changes, and is barely better than no commit messages at all.
That said, sometimes there's really only one kind of change that happens in a repo (ie. a repo where there's only one kind of update that you can make to a file), and in those projects, a tool like this makes sense. However, in most projects, it's bad, and you shouldn't do it.