How can I set up an editor to work with Git on Windows

Question

I m trying out Git on Windows  I got to the point of trying  git commit  and I got this error      Terminal is dumb but no VISUAL nor   EDITOR defined  Please supply the   message using either -m or -F option    So I figured out I need to have an environment variable called EDITOR  No problem  I set it to point to Notepad  That worked  almost  The default commit message opens in Notepad  But Notepad doesn t support bare line feeds  I went out and got Notepad    but I can t figure out how to get Notepad   set up as the  EDITOR  in such a way that it works with Git as expected   I m not married to Notepad    At this point I don t mind what editor I use  I just want to be able to type commit messages in an editor rather than the command line  with -m    Those of you using Git on Windows  What tool do you use to edit your commit messages  and what did you have to do to make it work

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I ve had difficulty getting Git to cooperate with WordPad  Komodo Edit and pretty much every other editor I give it  Most open for editing  but Git clearly doesn t wait for the save close to happen    As a crutch  I ve just been doing i e   git commit -m  Fixed the LoadAll method    to keep things moving  It tends to keep my commit messages a little shorter than they probably should be  but clearly there s some work to be done on the Windows version of Git   The GitGUI also isn t that bad  It takes a little bit of orientation  but after that  it works fairly well

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I just use TortoiseGit straight out the box  It integrates beautifully with my PuTTY public keys    It has a perfect editor for commit messages

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For Atom you can do  git config --global core editor  atom --wait    and similar for Visual Studio Code  git config --global core editor  code --wait    which will open up an Atom or Visual Studio Code window for you to commit through    or for Sublime Text   git config --global core editor  subl -n -w

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to add sublime git config --global core editor  quot  C  Program Files Sublime Text 3 sublime text exe  quot

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Notepad   works just fine  although I choose to stick with Notepad  -m  or even sometimes the built-in  edit    The problem you are encountering using Notepad   is related to how Git is launching the editor executable   My solution to this is to set environment variable EDITOR to a batch file  rather than the actual editor executable  that does the following   start  WAIT  E  PortableApps Notepad  Portable Notepad  Portable exe        WAIT tells the command line session to halt until the application exits  thus you will be able to edit to your heart s content while Git happily waits for you      passes all arguments to the batch file through to Notepad     C  src gt  echo  EDITOR  C  tools runeditor bat

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I managed to get the environment version working by setting the EDITOR variable using quotes and     EDITOR  c  Program Files  x86  Notepad   notepad   exe

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WordPad   I m happy using Vim  but since I m trying to introduce Git to the company I wanted something that we d all have  and found that WordPad seems to work okay  i e  Git does wait until you re finished editing and close the window    git config core editor   C  Program Files Windows NT Accessories wordpad exe     That s using Git Bash on msysgit  I ve not tried from the Windows command prompt  if that makes any difference

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Edit  After updating to Vim 7 3  I ve come to the conclusion that the cleanest and easiest way to do this is    Add Vim s main folder to your path  right click on My Computer  rarr  Properties  rarr  Advanced  rarr  Environment Variables  Run this   git config --global core editor  gvim --nofork          If you do it this way  then I am fairly sure it will work with Cygwin as well   Original answer   Even with a couple of Vim-related answers  I was having trouble getting this to work with gVim under Windows  while not using a batch file or  EDITOR  or Cygwin    What I eventually arrived at is nice and clean  and draws from a few of the solutions here   git config --global core editor     C  Program Files Vim vim72 gvim exe  --nofork         One gotcha that took me a while is these are not the Windows-style backslashes  They are normal forward slashes

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I had PortableGit 1 6 working fine  but after upgrading to the PortableGit 1 7 Windows release  I had problems  Some of the Git commands opens up the Notepad   exe fine  but some don t  especially Git rebase behaves differently   The problem is some commands run the Windows cmd process and some use the Unix cmd process  I want to give startup attributes to Notepad   editor  so I need to have a customized script  My solution is this    Create a script to run an appropriate text editor  The script looks weird  but it handles both the Windows and Unix variation   c  PortableGit cmd git-editor bat     bin sh   Open a new instance  function doUnix        c  program files notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -nosession -notabbar      exit    doUnix      WINCALL  c  program files notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -nosession -notabbar     Set the global core editor variable  The script was saved to git cmd folder  so it s already in a gitconsole path  This is mandatory as a full path may not work properly   git config --global core editor  git-editor bat     Now I can run the git commit -a and git rebase -i master commands  Give it a try if you have problems in the Git Windows tool

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I prefer to use Emacs  Getting it set up can be a little tricky    Download Emacs and unpack it somewhere like c  emacs  Run c  emacs bin addpm exe  You need to right-click and  Run as Administrator  if you are using Windows Vista or above  This will put the executables in your path  Add  server-start  somewhere in your  emacs file  See the Emacs Windows FAQ for advice on where to put your  emacs file  git config --global core editor emacsclientw   Git will now open files within an existing Emacs process  You will have to run that existing process manually from c  emacs bin runemacs exe

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Anyway  I ve just been playing around with this and found the following to work nicely for me   git config --global core editor   C  Program Files TextPad 5 TextPad exe  -m    I don t think CMD likes single-quotes so you must use double quotes  to specify the space embedded string argument    Cygwin  which I believe is the underlying platform for Git s Bash  on the other hand likes both   and    you can specify a CMD-like paths  using   instead of    so long as the string is quoted i e  in this instance  using single-quotes   The -m overrides indicates the use of multiple editors and there is no need for a    tacked on the end

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This is working for me using Cygwin and TextPad 6  EDIT  it is also working with TextPad 5 as long as you make the obvious change to the script   and presumably the model could be used for other editors as well   File    gitconfig    core      editor     script textpad sh   File   script textpad sh      bin bash  APP PATH  cygpath  c  program files  x86  textpad 6 textpad exe   FILE PATH  cygpath -w  1     APP PATH  -m   FILE PATH    This one-liner works as well   File   script textpad sh  option 2      cygpath  c  program files  x86  textpad 6 textpad exe    -m   cygpath -w  1

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Update September 2015  6 years later   The last release of git-for-Windows  2 5 3  now includes      By configuring git config core editor notepad  users can now use notepad exe as their default editor    Configuring git config format commitMessageColumns 72 will be picked up by the notepad wrapper and line-wrap the commit message after the user edits it    See commit 69b301b by Johannes Schindelin  dscho    And Git 2 16  Q1 2018  will show a message to tell the user that it is waiting for the user to finish editing when spawning an editor  in case the editor opens to a hidden window or somewhere obscure and the user gets lost   See commit abfb04d  07 Dec 2017   and commit a64f213  29 Nov 2017  by Lars Schneider  larsxschneider   Helped-by  Junio C Hamano  gitster    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 0c69a13  19 Dec 2017      launch editor    indicate that Git waits for user input      When a graphical GIT EDITOR is spawned by a Git command that opens   and waits for user input  e g   git rebase -i    then the editor window   might be obscured by other windows    The user might be left staring at   the original Git terminal window without even realizing that s he needs   to interact with another window before Git can proceed  To this user Git   appears hanging       Print a message that Git is waiting for editor input in the original   terminal and get rid of it when the editor returns  if the terminal   supports erasing the last line     Original answer  I just tested it with git version 1 6 2 msysgit 0 186 gf7512 and Notepad  5 3 1  I prefer to not have to set an EDITOR variable  so I tried   git config --global core editor    c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe      or git config --global core editor    c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe         That always gives   C  prog git gt git config --global --edit  c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe      c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe  command not found error  There was a problem with the editor   c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe         If I define a npp bat including    c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe       and I type   C  prog git gt git config --global core editor C  prog git npp bat   It just works from the DOS session  but not from the git shell   not that with the core editor configuration mechanism  a script with  start  WAIT     in it would not work  but only open a new DOS window     Bennett s answer mentions the possibility to avoid adding a script  but to reference directly the program itself between simple quotes  Note the direction of the slashes  Use   NOT   to separate folders in the path name   git config --global core editor     C  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin    Or if you are in a 64 bit system   git config --global core editor     C  Program Files  x86  Notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin    But I prefer using a script  see below   that way I can play with different paths or different options without having to register again a git config     The actual solution  with a script  was to realize that  what you refer to in the config file is actually a shell   bin sh  script  not a DOS script   So what does work is   C  prog git gt git config --global core editor C  prog git npp bat   with C  prog git npp bat      bin sh  c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst        or     bin sh  c  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin        With that setting  I can do  git config --global --edit  from DOS or Git Shell  or I can do  git rebase -i      from DOS or Git Shell  Bot commands will trigger a new instance of notepad    hence the -multiInst  option   and wait for that instance to be closed before going on   Note that I use only      not     And I installed msysgit using option 2   Add the git bin directory to the PATH environment variable  but without overriding some built-in windows tools   The fact that the notepad   wrapper is called  bat is not important  It would be better to name it  npp sh  and to put it in the  git  cmd directory though  or in any directory referenced by your PATH environment variable      See also    How do I view    git diff    output with visual diff program  for the general theory How do I setup DiffMerge with msysgit   gitk  for another example of external tool  DiffMerge  and WinMerge      lightfire228 adds in the comments      For anyone having an issue where N   just opens a blank file  and git doesn t take your commit message  see  Aborting commit due to empty message   change your  bat or  sh file to say      lt path-to-n     git COMMIT EDITMSG - lt arguments gt         That will tell notepad   to open the temp commit file  rather than a blank new one

User · Answer

I ve just had the same problem and found a different solution  I was getting   error  There was a problem with the editor  ec    I ve got VISUAL ec  and a batch file called ec bat on my path that contains one line   c  emacs emacs-23 1 bin emacsclient exe      This lets me edit files from the command line with ec  lt filename gt   and having VISUAL set means most unixy programs pick it up too  Git seems to search the path differently to my other commands though -  when I looked at a git commit in Process Monitor I saw it look in every folder on the path for ec and for ec exe  but not for ec bat  I added another environment variable  GIT EDITOR ec bat  and all was fine

User · Answer

Vim gVim works well for me    gt echo  EDITOR   c  Vim Vim71 vim exe

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When using a remotely mounted homedrive  Samba share  NFS       your    git folder is shared across all systems which can lead to several problems  Thus I prefer a script to determine the right editor for the right system      usr bin perl   Detect which system I m on and choose the right editor  unamea    uname -a   if  unamea     mingw i       if  unamea     devsystem i   Check hostname         exec  C  Program Files  x86  Notepad   notepad   exe    -multiInst    -nosession    ARGV             if  unamea     testsystem i           exec  C  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe    -multiInst    -nosession    ARGV            MCEDIT  which mcedit   if  MCEDIT     mcedit        exec  MCEDIT   ARGV      NANO  which nano   if  NANO     nano        exec  NANO   ARGV     die  You don t have a suitable editor  n     One might consider a plain shell script  but I used Perl as it is shipped with msysgit and your Unix-like systems will usually provide one as well  Putting the script in  home username bin  which should be added to PATH in  bashrc or  profile  Once added with git config --global core editor giteditor pl you have the right editor  wherever you are

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I use Cygwin on Windows  so I use   export EDITOR  emacs -nw    The -nw is for no-windows  i e  tell Emacs not to try and use X Window   The Emacs keybindings don t work for me from a Windows shell  so I would only use this from a Cygwin shell     rxvt is recommended

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This is the one symptom of greater issues  Notably that you have something setting TERM dumb  Other things that don t work properly are the less command which says you don t have a fully functional terminal   It seems like this is most commonly caused by having TERM set to something in your global Windows environment variables  For me  the issue came up when I installed Strawberry Perl some information about this is on the msysgit bug for this problem as well as several solutions   The first solution is to fix it in your    bashrc by adding   export TERM msys   You can do this from the Git Bash prompt like so   echo  export TERM msys   gt  gt     bashrc   The other solution  which ultimately is what I did because I don t care about Strawberry Perl s reasons for adding TERM dumb to my environment settings  is to go and remove the TERM dumb as directed in this comment on the msysgit bug report      Control   Panel System Advanced Environment   Variables     or similar  depending on   your  version of Windows  is where   sticky environment variables are set   on Windows  By  default  TERM is not   set  If TERM is set in there  then you    or one of the programs  you have   installed - e g  Strawberry Perl  has   set it  Delete that setting  and you   should be fine    Similarly if you use Strawberry Perl and care about the CPAN client or something like that  you can leave the TERM dumb alone and use unset TERM in your    bashrc file which will have a similar effect to setting an explicit term as above   Of course  all the other solutions are correct in that you can use git config --global core editor  MYFAVORITEEDITOR to make sure that Git uses your favorite editor when it needs to launch one for you

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I m using GitHub for Windows which is a nice visual option  But I also prefer the command line  so to make it work when I open a repository in a Git shell I just set the following   git config --global core editor vim   which works great

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I use Git on multiple platforms  and I like to use the same Git settings on all of them   In fact  I have all my configuration files under release control with Git  and put a Git repository clone on each machine   The solution I came up with is this   I set my editor to giteditor  git config --global core editor giteditor   Then I create a symbolic link called giteditor which is in my PATH   I have a personal bin directory  but anywhere in the PATH works   That link points to my current editor of choice  On different machines and different platforms  I use different editors  so this means that I don t have to change my universal Git configuration   gitconfig   just the link that giteditor points to   Symbolic links are handled by every operating system I know of  though they may use different commands  For Linux  you use ln -s  For Windows  you use the cmd built-in mklink  They have different syntaxes  which you should look up   but it all works the same way  really

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I also use Cygwin on Windows  but with gVim  as opposed to the terminal-based Vim    To make this work  I have done the following    Created a one-line batch file  named git editor bat  which contains the following   C  Program Files Vim vim72 gvim exe  --nofork      Placed git editor bat on in my PATH  Set GIT EDITOR git editor bat   With this done  git commit  etc  will correctly invoke the gVim executable   NOTE 1  The --nofork option to gVim ensures that it blocks until the commit message has been written   NOTE 2  The quotes around the path to gVim is required if you have spaces in the path   NOTE 3  The quotes around      are needed just in case Git passes a file path with spaces

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Edit  gitconfig file in c  Users YourUser folder and add    core  editor    C   Program files  path  to  editor exe

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Atom and Windows 10  I right clicked the Atom icon at the desktop and clicked on properties   Copied the  quot Start in quot  location path  Looked over there with Windows  Explorer and found  quot atom exe quot    I typed this in Git Bash  git config --global core editor C  Users YOURNAMEUSER AppData Local atom app-1 7 4 atom exe quot     Note  I changed all   for     I created a  bashrc at my home directory and used   to set my home directory and it worked  so I assumed   will be the way to go  atom-editor git git-bash windows-10

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Based on VonC s suggestion  this worked for me  was driving me crazy    git config --global core editor   C  Program Files  x86  Sublime Text 3 subl exe  -wait    Omitting -wait can cause problems  especially if you are working with Gerrit and change ids that have to be manually copied to the bottom of your commit message

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Here is a solution with Cygwin      bin dash -e if     1    then k   cygpath -w   1   elif           0   then k  fi Notepad2   k   k      If no path  pass no path If path is empty  pass empty path If path is not empty  convert to Windows format    Then I set these variables   export EDITOR notepad2 sh export GIT EDITOR  dash  usr local bin notepad2 sh     EDITOR allows script to work with Git GIT EDITOR allows script to work with Hub commands   Source

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Thanks to the Stack nbsp Overflow community     and a little research I was able to get my favorite editor   EditPad Pro  to work as the core editor with msysgit 1 7 5 GIT and TortoiseGit v1 7 3 0 over Windows nbsp XP SP3     Following the advice above  I added the path to a Bash script for the code editor     git config --global core editor c  msysgit cmd epp sh   However  after several failed attempts at the above mentioned solutions     I was finally able to get this working  Per EditPad Pro s documentation  adding the   newinstance  flag would allow the shell to wait for the editor input     The   newinstance  flag was the key in my case        bin sh  C  Program Files JGsoft EditPadPro6 EditPadPro exe    newinstance

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This works for PowerShell and cmder 1 2  when used with PowerShell   In file    gitconfig    core      editor    c  program files sublime text 3 subl exe  -w   How can I make Sublime Text the default editor for Git

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This is my setup to use Geany as an editor for Git   git config --global core editor C  path to geany bat   with the following content in geany bat      bin sh  C  Program Files Geany bin Geany exe  --new-instance        It works in both a DOS console and msysgit

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I needed to do both of the following to get Git to launch Notepad   in Windows    Add the following to  gitconfig   editor    C  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin  Modify the shortcut to launch the Git Bash shell to run as administrator  and then use that to launch the Git Bash shell  I was guessing that the context menu entry  Git Bash here  was not launching Notepad   with the required permissions     After doing both of the above  it worked

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It seems as if Git won t find the editor if there are spaces in the path  So you will have to put the batch file mentioned in Patrick s answer into a non-whitespace path

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This worked for me    Add the directory which contains the editor s executable to your PATH variable   E g   C  Program Files Sublime Text 3    Reboot your computer  Change the core editor global Git variable to the name of the editor executable without the extension   exe   e g  git config --global core editor sublime text    That s it   NOTE  Sublime Text 3 is the editor I used for this example

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Those of you using Git on Windows  What tool do you use to edit your commit messages  and what did you have to do to make it work    The tool that I find the most useful as both my git editor and my general-purpose code editor  in both Windows and Linux  is Sublime Text 3  It works really well  but requires a little bit of setup to get it just right  so I ve fully documented that fully here    How do I make Git use the editor of my choice for commits  - Best settings for Sublime Text 3 as your Git editor  Windows  amp  Linux instructions    Side note about my main editor  for big projects I use Eclipse as my primary editor  and Sublime Text 3 as my git editor and additional file editor when I need to make use of its advanced features such as multi-cursor mode  vertical column selection mode  etc  For small to medium projects I use just Sublime Text 3 by itself  For setup instructions for Eclipse  see my PDF document here

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Building on Darren s answer  to use Notepad   you can simply do this  all on one line    git config --global core editor   C  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe  -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin    Obviously  the C  Program Files Notepad   notepad   exe part should be the path to the Notepad   executable on your system  For example  it might be C  Program Files  x86  Notepad   notepad   exe   It works like a charm for me

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I found a a beautifully simple solution posted here - although there may be a mistake in the path in which you have to copy over the  subl  file given by the author   I am running Windows nbsp 7 x64  and I had to put the  subl  file in my  Git cmd  folder to make it work    It works like a charm  though

[windows] How can I set up an editor to work with Git on Windows?

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