Commit notes

A commit message is written once and then frozen: changing it rewrites the commit, gives it a new hash, and breaks everyone who already has the old one. That is fine an hour after committing and impossible a week later.

git notes is the way out. A note is stored beside the commit, under refs/notes/commits, and attaching one leaves the commit byte-for-byte identical. So it works on history that is already published — which is exactly when you most want to add something.

Typical use: the review that approved it, the ticket it closed, why it was reverted, which release it shipped in.

Writing one

Select a commit. Under the message there is a Note section: Add a note, type, Save note. Multi-line is fine.

Writing a note under a pushed commit's message, then saving it

Saving a note is an ordinary Gitcito action — it toasts, and Undo puts the previous text back, including restoring a note you removed.

Clearing the text and saving removes the note; there is no such thing as an empty note.

Finding one

Notes are invisible in a normal log, which is the main reason people never discover them. Gitcito marks a commit that carries one with a small note icon in the graph's message column, so the annotation is findable without knowing it is there.

From the command line, git log --notes prints them under each message.

Sharing them

This is the part that surprises everyone: a normal git push does not push notes, and a normal git fetch does not fetch them. They live outside refs/heads and refs/tags, so the default refspecs skip them entirely. Notes written on your laptop stay on your laptop until someone moves them explicitly.

Tools → Note → Push notes / Fetch notes, per remote. They run:

git push <remote> refs/notes/commits
git fetch <remote> +refs/notes/commits:refs/notes/commits

Only the commit-notes ref travels — Gitcito's own machine-local refs (like the local CI verdicts) are deliberately not published.

Some hosts also need notes enabled or allowed on their side; a rejection there is the host's policy, not a Gitcito limit.

No shared remote, or no write access? Secure share can pack a repository's notes into an encrypted file a teammate imports directly, with a preview of what would land and an explicit overwrite choice for diverging notes.

Limits

One notes ref. Gitcito reads and writes the default refs/notes/commits. Custom namespaces (git notes --ref=review) are not exposed — a repository using them will not see those notes here.
No merge of diverging notes. If two people annotate the same commit and both push, git refuses the second push. Resolving that means git notes merge in the terminal.
Notes are not backed up by a purge backup or by snapshots. They are ordinary refs and survive normal operations, but a repository re-cloned from scratch starts without them.

See also: Committing · The commit graph