That's also what I do. When releasing a new version, I run a script/gradle task/... that:
- compiles all commit messages since previous version
- filters unwanted messages (according to special tags)
- groups them by category (fixes, enhancements, ...)
- opens an editor so that a human can prettify the changes
- appends the end result to changelog
- updates version files
- commit changes / git tag / etc
EDIT: formatting
BTW, I always have to set up those tasks myself. I'm surprised some kind of standard tool does not exist. I guess everybody has their own preferences and no standard really emerged...
There are probably a lot of tools that do this. The conventional-changelog[1] is one project, and it links out many others. AngularJS is a good example of a project that's been using that style for quite some time. I ended up using that as inspiration for my own tool (similar to yours) because as you mention, a lot of the pieces can be idiosyncratic to the project, and it turned out to be a relatively straight forward affair anyways. But if I were starting an open-source (node) project today, I'd probably just use the standard-version tools and forget about it.
I like your idea of opening it in an editor to prettify it up. It seems to go at least part way to integration Help Documentation in the process which is something I'd like to achieve
- compiles all commit messages since previous version
- filters unwanted messages (according to special tags)
- groups them by category (fixes, enhancements, ...)
- opens an editor so that a human can prettify the changes
- appends the end result to changelog
- updates version files
- commit changes / git tag / etc
EDIT: formatting
BTW, I always have to set up those tasks myself. I'm surprised some kind of standard tool does not exist. I guess everybody has their own preferences and no standard really emerged...