Comment by p_wood

> In my experience pre-commit hooks are most often used to generate a starting commit message.

The `prepare-commit-msg` hook is a better place to do that as it gives the hook some context about the commit (is the user amending an existing commit etc.)

> To put it even more bluntly, if you are trying to enforce proper formatting, pre-commit hooks are absolutely the wrong tool for the job, as hooks are trivially bypassable, and not shared when cloning a repo, by design.

They aren't a substitute for server post-receive hooks but they do help avoid having pushes rejected by the server.