This looks like it does what it sets out to do well. I think commits and changelogs serve separate purposes, but I have gone to commit some changes and wanted to at least see the text from the changelog enough times that I wrote a prepare-commit-message git hook to help out. It detects changelogs and starts out the commit message with any new lines, or puts a little (commented) message in the commit message if no changelogs were altered, kind of as a reminder to think about whether the changes being committed really should include updates to the changelog. It's been very helpful, so much so that I installed it as a global hook!