Sometime, it's useful to have the last 5 commits to name it's own commit. This hook will add this information in comment at the end of the text editor

prepare-commit-msg

#!/bin/sh
#
# An example hook script to prepare the commit log message.
# Called by "git commit" with the name of the file that has the
# commit message, followed by the description of the commit
# message's source.  The hook's purpose is to edit the commit
# message file.  If the hook fails with a non-zero status,
# the commit is aborted.
#
# To enable this hook, rename this file to "prepare-commit-msg".

# This hook will display your five last commit msg in one line format as below
#
# GIT LOG:
#
#   324a081 (HEAD -> master) [xxx] implement the method to refreshNormalization
#   047011b (origin/master) [xxx] add venv generation in one command
#   92f6416 [xxx] add instruction to package a distribution
#   9e7144e [xxx] design and define the command to implement

# run this part of the code only when
# the prepare-commit-msg script is invoke by git commit,
# not git commit -m or git commit --amend
if [ x = x${2} ]; then
    commit_message_file=$1
    echo "# GIT LOG:" >> ${commit_message_file}
    echo "# " >> ${commit_message_file}
    git log --pretty="tformat:%C(auto) %h %d %s %x00" --abbrev-commit --decorate -n 5 |\
        tr -d '\n' |\
        xargs -0 -I '{}' echo "#   {}" >> ${commit_message_file}
fi

tree

.
├── [...]
└── .git
    ├── branches
    ├── COMMIT_EDITMSG
    ├── config
    ├── description
    ├── HEAD
    ├── hooks
    │   ├── applypatch-msg.sample
    │   ├── commit-msg.sample
    │   ├── post-update.sample
    │   ├── pre-applypatch.sample
    │   ├── pre-commit.sample
    │   ├── prepare-commit-msg <- we will modify this file
    │   ├── pre-push.sample
    │   ├── pre-rebase.sample
    │   ├── pre-receive.sample
    │   └── update.sample