Add line break to git commit -m from the command line

Question

I am using Git from the command line and am trying to add a line break to the commit message  using git commit -m     without going into Vim   Is this possible

User · Answer

From Git documentation      -m  lt msg gt     --message  lt msg gt     Use the given  lt msg gt  as the commit message  If multiple -m options are given  their values are concatenated as separate paragraphs    So  if you are looking for grouping multiple commit messages this should do the work   git commit -m  commit message1  -m  commit message2

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There is no need complicating the stuff  After the -m  text    the next line is gotten by pressing Enter  When Enter is pressed  gt  appears  When you are done  just put   and press Enter     git commit -m  Another way of demonstrating multicommit messages   gt   gt  This is a new line written  gt  This is another new line written  gt  This one is really awesome too and we can continue doing so till         git log -1 commit 5474e383f2eda610be6211d8697ed1503400ee42  HEAD - gt  test2  Author                  lt           gmail com gt  Date    Mon Oct 9 13 30 26 2017  0200  Another way of demonstrating multicommit messages   This is a new line written This is another new line written This one is really awesome too and we can continue doing so till

User · Answer

If you are using Bash  hit C-x C-e  Ctrl x Ctrl e   and it will open the current command in your preferred editor   You can change the preferred editor by tweaking VISUAL and EDITOR   That s what I have in my  bashrc   export ALTERNATE EDITOR    export EDITOR  emacsclient -t  export VISUAL  emacsclient -c  export SUDO EDITOR  emacsclient -t

User · Answer

Adding line breaks to your Git commit  Try the following to create a multi-line commit message   git commit -m  Demonstrate multi-line commit message in Powershell  -m  Add a title to your commit after -m enclosed in quotes  then add the body of your comment after a second -m  Press ENTER before closing the quotes to add a line break  Repeat as needed  Then close the quotes and hit ENTER twice to apply the commit     Then verify what you ve done   git log -1   You should end up with something like this     The screenshot is from an example I set up using PowerShell with Poshgit

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I hope this isn t leading too far away from the posted question  but setting the default editor and then using  git commit -e   might be much more comfortable

User · Answer

IMO the initial commit message line is supposed to be to short  to the point instead of paragraph  So using git commit -m  quot  lt short message gt  quot  will suffice After that in order to expand upon the initial commit message we can use git commit --amend which will open the vim and then we can enter the explanation for the commit message which in my opinion easier than command line

User · Answer

Doing something like  git commit -m test ntest    doesn t work  but something like  git commit -m   echo -e  test ntest      works  but it s not very pretty  You set up a git-commitlb command in your PATH which does something like this      bin bash  message  1  git commit -m   echo -e   message      And use it like this   git commitlb  line1 nline2 nline3    Word of warning  I have a feeling that the general convention is to have a summary line as the first line  and then two line breaks  and then an extended message in the commit message  so doing something like this would break that convention  You could of course do   git commitlb  line1 n nline2 nline3

User · Answer

Sadly  git doesn t seem to allow for any newline character in its message  There are various reasonable solutions already above  but when scripting  those are annoying  Here documents also work  but may also a bit too annoying to deal with  think yaml files   Here is what I did   git commit       --message  Subject        --message  First line  echo Second line  echo Third Line    While this is also still ugly  it allows for  one-liners  which may be useful still  As usually the strings are variables or combined with variables  the uglynes may be kept to a minimum

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Certainly  how it s done depends on your shell  In Bash  you can use single quotes around the message and can just leave the quote open  which will make Bash prompt for another line  until you close the quote  Like this   git commit -m  Message  goes here    Alternatively  you can use a  here document   also known as heredoc    git commit -F-  lt  lt EOF Message  goes here EOF

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If you just want  say  a head line and a content line  you can use   git commit -m  My head line  -m  My content line     Note that this creates separate paragraphs - not lines  So there will be a blank line between each two -m lines  e g    My head line  My content line

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Personally  I find it easiest to modify commit messages after the fact in vi  or whatever your git editor of choice is  rather than on the command line  by doing git commit --amend right after git commit

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I don t see anyone mentioning that if you don t provide a message it will open nano for you  at least in Linux  where you can write multiple lines    Only this is needed  git commit

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You should be able to use  git commit -m   first line nsecond line    From the Bash manual      Words of the form   string  are treated specially  The word expands to   string  with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the   ANSI C standard    This includes support for newlines as shown above  plus hex and Unicode codes and others  Go to the linked section to see a list of the backslash-escaped characters

User · Answer

Here is a list of failing solutions on Windows with standard cmd exe shell  to save you some trial-and-error time      git commit -m  Hello Enter doesn t work  it won t ask for a new line git commit -m  Hello Enter idem git commit -m  Hello  Enter idem git commit -m  Hello  Enter World  looks like working because it asks  More   and allows to write a new line  but finally when doing git log you will see that it s still a one-line message      TL DR  Even if on Windows  commandline parsing works differently  and   allows multiline input  it doesn t help here   Finally git commit -e is probably the best option

User · Answer

Using Git from the command line with Bash you can do the following   git commit -m  this is  gt  a line  gt  with new lines  gt  maybe    Simply type and press Enter when you want a new line  the     symbol means that you have pressed Enter  and there is a new line  Other answers work also

User · Answer

I use zsh on a Mac  and I can post multi-line commit messages within double quotes      Basically I keep typing and pressing return for new lines  but the message isn t sent to Git until I close the quotes and return

User · Answer

In Bash Zsh you can simply use literal line breaks inside quotes  git commit -m  Multi-line commit message   ANSI-C quoting also works in Bash Zsh  git commit -m   Multi-line ncommit nmessage  You can also instruct Git to use an editor of your choice to edit the commit message  From the docs on git-commit   The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from the GIT EDITOR environment variable  the core editor configuration variable  the VISUAL environment variable  or the EDITOR environment variable  in that order   See git-var for details   So to edit your message using nano  for example  you can run  export GIT EDITOR nano git commit

[git] Add line break to 'git commit -m' from the command line

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