The really funny thing here is that I’m used to seeing the scissors line because I set commit.verbose, but I’d been puzzling from time to time over what that >8 in the middle of the line was, and just a few hours ago I finally realised (prompted no doubt by dwelling on core.commentchar) that it was ASCII art scissors. >8 feels weird, even though it’s the direction a right-hander would cut paper; 8< feels more natural for some reason (maybe because LTR language?).

You’re quite right, scissors is better. TIL! I have now set my commit.cleanup to scissors. I could even drop core.commentchar and my gitcommit and gitrebase syntax and after/ftplugin/ patches.