[colelyman]

One tool that I think promotes commit messages like the OP is magit in Emacs. Before using magit, I always used `git commit -m '...'` and didn't realize that commit messages could be longer than a line.

I agree that this is a tooling problem, but magit is a breath of fresh air in many ways (including verbose commit messages).

[nequo]

What I like about magit is that it shows me the diff of the would-be commit when I write the commit message. And also that I can pick which sections of the diff to a file I want to include in the commit.

I used Vim + git CLI before and this was much less convenient. (I never tried fugitive though. It might be similarly great on these two features.)