UX Glossary · C
Commit
A saved, described snapshot of changes in version control, and the unit teams review and revert.
A commit records a set of changes in a version control system such as Git, together with a message describing them. It is the unit of history: what changed, who changed it, when, and why.
Why a designer should care
Three reasons, all practical.
Content and design files increasingly live there too. A site whose content is Markdown in a repository, or a design system whose tokens are code, means design changes are commits. That is a feature: every change is attributable and reversible.
It explains what “reverting” costs. A change that is one commit is cheap to undo. A change tangled across thirty is not, which is often the real reason a team resists a design change late in a project.
Commit history is documentation. When nobody remembers why a component behaves oddly, the commit that introduced it frequently says.
In practice
For a designer working in a content repository, the useful habits are small: commit one logical change at a time, and write the message for the person who will read it in six months, which is usually you.