Question

Is it possible to show the text of the last commit when I do a git commit.

I frequently need to check in and associate with a ticket number and I always tend to forget the number and have to go back and do a git log to find out the previous commit and get the ticket id, it would reduce a bit of friction of this was just included in the commit comments that are shown.

Answer 1

You could use a prepare-commit-msg hook script to add comments about the most recent commit in the file used for editing the message for the next commit. A basic implementation would be:

#!/bin/sh
tmpf=`tempfile`
git show | sed 's/^/# /' > "$tmpf"
cat "$1" >> "$tmpf"
mv "$tmpf" "$1"