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+[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks.png?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks)
+
 pre-commit
 ==========
 
 A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks.
 
 Some out-of-the-box hooks: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
+
+
+## What is a "pre-commit"
+
+A pre-commit is some code that runs before commiting code to do some spot-checking for some basic programming mistakes.
+
+## Why make this project?
+
+We noticed that when creating a git repo it was not convenient to create pre-commit hooks.  Often we resorted to copy/paste to include a set of useful hooks. https://github.com/causes/overcommit is an awesome project, but locked us into ruby and system packages -- which we wanted to avoid.