[Feature Request] Line length warning

[Lee-W]

Description

It's recommended to have only 72 characters. We could add a warning or a hint if the generated title might exceed 72.

Possible Solution

Add a line hint like vim

Additional context

Related Issue

[woile]

You mean for the commit subject? Where would we add this?

Remember that this is not a problem for the changelog. I'm not sure why the line length was chosen to be 72.

[Lee-W]

The first line of our generated commit. e.g., feat(new): awesome feature. I'm thinking of make the functions in commitizen/utils.py and this funtionality something like commitizen-plugins. But it's still a rough idea.

I guess the number is from here

[woile]

IMO we should add it as a config parameter (max_subject_length), disabled by default, or set to 0 which would mean: anything.

I like the plugins idea, not sure how to hook everything haha but it's interesting

[Lee-W]

This could be my next target after #128 haha. Also, if my memory serves me right, you've mentioned implementing changelog-hooks (like email-hooks or slack-hooks). Do you have any idea how we should group them. Add them into to this repo as extra deps? Or, create another repo like commitizen-changelog-hooks?

[woile]

I was thinking more like separate packages, so people can choose which one to install:

pip install cz-slack-hook cz-email-hook

and then in your cz.toml

hooks = [
  "slack-hook",
  "email-hook"
] 

[jtpavlock]

I agree with the 72 character default for the commit title, as that's the max github displays in the commit history.

[Lee-W]

Here's a way to implement similar functionality https://github.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen/issues/331#issue-780669838. Not yet tried this functionality on cz-cli. might need some investigation

[changchaishi]

Hi there! I found a feasible solution for line length warning. It is done by questionary's text validator, which will show a red color background warning at the bottom-left corner of the console.

the sample code is:

import questionary
from questionary import Validator, ValidationError

class NameValidator(Validator):
    def validate(self, document):
        text_len = len(document.text)
        if True:
            raise ValidationError(
                message=f"({text_len}/72)",
                cursor_position=text_len,
            )

questionary.text("Hi, type anything below:\n", validate=NameValidator).ask()

and result is:

This approach considered all text validation results are always False, so that it can keep up and update the warning text at below. Another approach is to stop the input cursor when text reaches maximum length.

[Lee-W]

Thanks for sharing! This is really helpful. I'm thinking of making those two behavior confiugrable

[woile]

That's super cool finding!

[jubenitezg]

Hello everyone! I liked @iknowright 's solution, unfortunately from the Questionary docs - "A user can not submit an answer if it doesn’t pass the validation.", however, his approach can be modified to show to the user when the 72 character limit is exceeded.

Result:

import questionary
from questionary import Validator, ValidationError

class NameValidator(Validator):
    def validate(self, document):
        text_len = len(document.text)
        if text_len > 72:
            raise ValidationError(
                message=f"({text_len}/72)",
                cursor_position=text_len,
            )

questionary.text("Hi, type anything below:\n", validate=NameValidator).ask()

Any thoughts on this?

[Lee-W]

I'm good with it 👍

[kevin1kevin1k]

I'm trying to work on this issue, and found one interesting bottleneck: If we want to validate the commit message from prefix to subject, i.e., prefix(scope): subject, then the validating function or class would need to know about the previously-input prefix and scope, which I found difficult to do now via something like the following.

"type": "input",
"name": "subject",
# added validator cannot access the results from other questions
"validate": SomeValidator,
"filter": parse_subject,
"message": (
    "Write a short and imperative summary of the code changes: (lower case and no period)\n"
),

Therefore, before questionary supports the desired access, one workaround is to validate the length in, for example, ConventionalCommitsCz.message(), where the results are available in the answers dict. There are some drawbacks:

• The validation cannot be performed on the fly as desired
• The exception is raised before git.commit, so we cannot use the --retry feature.

Please refer to https://github.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen/pull/557.

Any ideas or better solutions are welcome!

[rkr87]

I totally understand it's not desirable but I don't think there's any particular issue in this case, but couldn't this be achieved with a global variable update on type and scope update? I'm new to Commitizen and Python in general so take any of my suggestions with a pinch of salt, but wouldn't doing something like below work?

MESSAGE_LENGTH = 0

def parse_type(text):
    global MESSAGE_LENGTH
    MESSAGE_LENGTH += len(text)

def parse_scope(text):
    if not text:
        return ""
    global MESSAGE_LENGTH
    scope = text.strip().split()
    
    if len(scope) == 1:
        MESSAGE_LENGTH += len(scope[0])
        return scope[0]
    text = "-".join(scope)
    MESSAGE_LENGTH += len(text)
    return text

Then use MESSAGE_LENGTH in your SomeValidator?

[jtpavlock]

Would it be possible to also check the configured line length with cz check in case you commit without using the prompt?

[Lee-W]

maybe we could make the length an option 🤔 @kevin1kevin1k will you be interested in it?