Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022)
41 comments
·June 22, 2025oftenwrong
Another little-known feature is git trailers:
https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers
These are key-value structures data that can be included on a commit when it is created. These are used by some systems for attaching metadata. For example, Gerrit uses this for attaching its Change-Id.
adregan
While I mostly try to go with the flow, I do get frustrated that there are more natural places to integrate with a issue tracking system like trailers, but they are so far off issue trackers’ happy path that it’s not worth it.
I think the problem is exacerbated by the fact that issue trackers follow fashion; and it’s more common that you are using the flavor of the week; and that flavor isn’t close to feature complete; and new features get added at a glacial pace.
I suppose this is a long winded way of stating how annoyed I am with branch names derived from linear ticket’s titles for tracking purposes, and I wish I could use some other form of metadata to associate commits with an issue, so that I could have more meaningful PR titles (enforced that I must use the linear branch name as the title).
Though I’ll admit that it’s an issue of a size that’s more appropriate to gripe about on the internet than try to change.
mdaniel
I recently learned that GitHub uses it for an alternative to including [skip ci] for what I presume is easier removal by downstream consumers of the commit message https://docs.github.com/en/actions/managing-workflow-runs-an...
I don't know why they mandate it to be the last trailer unless it's for regex reasons
oftenwrong
One more similar feature from a different system: PostgreSQL COMMENT
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/sql-comment.html
This allows you to attach text to various database objects in PostgreSQL.
I wish PostgreSQL had a feature that was more like structured key-value database object metadata that could be edited.
Pxtl
MS SQL has a similar feature called Extended Properties but the API is quite tedious.
EPWN3D
Yeah I love trailers. I remember trying to use notes for certain things, and they were just kind of a pain (though I cannot remember exactly what roadblocks I hit). Trailers met my needs nicely.
stephenlf
This is fantastic. This could really beef up CI with ticket numbers and stuff.
homebrewer
Also supported by Forgejo since version 10 (released in January of this year):
Tmpod
That's neat, ty for sharing!
legends2k
I discovered notes from the man pages around 2020 but didn't use them as it was primarily a local repo feature. By default they don't get pushed or fetched. If course, one can configure it such that it's pushed and fetched, but that's a team decision and mine didn't vote for it.
b0a04gl
i use git notes pretty heavily in my current role. started as an experiment to keep track of internal code reviews without flooding the commit message or making PRs for everything. i tag every commit with context what tickets it maps to, infra constraints, links to incident threads if it's a fix. all lives in the repo. this avoids the need to grep slack or jira just to know why a line changed. nce you start using it at scale, you realise how little you need the platform UI at all. we keep talking about reproducibility in builds, but never in intent. maybe this is where that starts
kccqzy
Git notes are only cool if you frequently add text to a commit after the commit has happened and visible to others.
The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made. And git commit message basically can have an unlimited length, so you could very well copy all the discussions about the commit that happened on a forge into the commit message itself.
One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Zambyte
> The Acked-By and mailing list discussion link examples don't seem to be good examples. Both of these are likely already known when the commit is made.
Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
> One use case I think might be a better example is to add a git note to a commit that has later been reverted.
Commit messages are better for this use case. When you got blame a file, it shows the latest changes for that file. If a commit reverts changes from another commit, the newer commit that reverts the older commit will show up in the blame.
saghm
> Discussion regarding a commit (is: review) and acknowledgment of a commit cannot happen before the commit has been made.
It can't happen before the commit on a feature branch, but it can happen before merging the commit back to the main development branch. Given that a rebase or merge commit is already frequently necessary to integrate changes from a feature branch after review is finished, I don't see why this type of info couldn't be added (or even required to exist) before merging.
Pxtl
The history-destroying problems of rebasing are a rant on their own.
0x696C6961
Discussion can keep happening after the commit is created.
noelwelsh
This is a UI problem, not a lack-of-knowledge problem. If Github's UI surfaced notes they would instantly get much more usage.
stephenlf
Yeah I wish GitHub supported these
remram
In practice I get a lot of value out of referencing commit hashes. If I fix a problem I introduced in a previous commit (for example, commit bumped version, and I forgot to bump it somewhere), my fix will say "amends ab12cd34".
That way when I need to cherry-pick that commit, or do something similar (bump again), I can search for the hash of the commit I'm looking at to find what might be missing.
UI is worse than git-notes but no need for additional setup to sync them.
olejorgenb
What happens of you rebase a branch containing commits with notes attached?
paffdragon
Check the notes.rewrite config options in https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes#Documentation/git-notes.t... Also notes.rewriteRef. You can use these to configure git to carry your notes across amend/rebase.
jwilk
Notes are copied to from the original to the rewritten commit by default. See https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes#Documentation/git-notes.t... for details.
But I have this in my IRC logs:
< _jwilk> TIL git-notes rewriting doesn't work properly when doing amend within rebase. :/hungryhobbit
Coolest? It's just extra comments...
Shank
Why did GitHub remove support for them, and how do we get this decision reversed?
fmbb
I think the answer is in the link.
Making git notes more usable would make it easier to migrate from GitHub. It would make you less locked in.
marcodiego
I bet it already exists, but what about an issue tracker in plain text maintained by git itself?
lelanthran
> I bet it already exists, but what about an issue tracker in plain text maintained by git itself?
I have an issue tracker file that can be added to a project. While it's technically plain text, the interface for the file ensures that a format is used, and the format ensures that changes reflect only a single ticket.
Just as long as no one edits the file using a different program, it will work just fine.
Don't think anyone uses it, though.
shawnz
See this recent discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971620
And less recently:
righthand
Also checkout fossil-scm.org
I wrote a little tool for versioning based on conventional commits that uses git note for a version override. In case you want to force a specific version instead of the one autodetected, you can add a git note with the version you want.
This was useful when migrating a piece of functionality into its own repo and you want to preserve history. Adding these forced version tags into commits would be quite messy in the new repo where you switch to a new versioning scheme.