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

Answer 1

This worked for me:

1. Add the directory which contains the editor's executable to your PATH variable. (E.g. "C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\")
2. Reboot your computer.
3. 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.

Answer 2

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 <filename>, 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.

Answer 3

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"

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Thanks to the Stack 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 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 "$*"

Answer 6

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.