Use "committish" rather than "commitish" in docs - #7236
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nwt
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Aug 23, 2026
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What's Changing
This proposes using the Git-aligned spelling "committish" rather than the "commitish" that currently appears in the docs.
The "commitish" spelling also appears many places in the code, so if we make the change at the docs layer we might want to think about doing it in the code to match.
Why
The term originates with Git, whose glossary defines it as "commit-ish (also committish)". Both of the spellings Git sanctions have either the hyphen or the double "t". Ours has neither.
Git's own practice is lopsided. Counts of each spelling inside the
git/gitrepository, via GitHub code search:git/gitcommittishcommit-ishcommitishI went with
committishrather thancommit-ishbecause it reads better in running prose and avoids an awkward line-break hazard. Git explicitly sanctions both.Since
super dbis Git-shaped, readers may arrive with Git's vocabulary already loaded, so it seems logical to match Git's spelling.Part of why I lean toward wanting to make this change is because I hope to introduce codespell for automated spell checking in a future PR, and they correct "commitish" to "committish" in their default dictionary. If we want to stick with what we're already doing, of course I could just add an exclusion. Ours to decide.
Counterargument
In fairness, the raw numbers across all of GitHub favor our current spelling:
commitishcommittishcommit-ishBut roughly 44,928 of those
commitishhits aretarget_commitish, the field name in GitHub's Releases API, so that's one upstream API decision replicated across tens of thousands of repos.In the Code
The word appears 118 times repo-wide: 42 in docs and the rest in Go and the PEG grammar. Claude helped me check that "commitish" does not currently leak out into help text, parse errors, or user-visible strings, so if we were ok making this change in the user-facing docs and want to let it live on as "commitish" in the code, I'm personally fine with that. But if folks that look after the code are on board with the docs change and want to be fully consistent in the code too, great.