How to abort a git rebase from inside vim during interactive editing

Question

When I do an interactive rebase, e.g.

git rebase -i HEAD~3

the rebase interactive editor (vim in my case) opens to let me edit the commits

Answer 1

Delete all text in your text editor screen, then save the file with the default supplied path.

Answer 2

Just delete all the lines that are not comments from the file. Then save it to the default supplied path and exit the editor.

As a result git will just do nothing in this rebase.

To delete all lines in vim you can use

:%d|x

Then save and quit.

delete all lines of file in Vim

How to exit the Vim editor?

VIM - multiple commands on same line

Answer 3

If you exit the editor with an error code, the rebase will be aborted.

To exit with an error code on vim, do

:cq

See here and vimdoc here.

Answer 4

If you're using Notepad++ on Windows for instance:

CtrlA to select everything, then Del or Backspace to delete and CtrlS save. Git will abort the rebase if the file is empty.

You may also hit CtrlC in the command prompt where git is running to stop the current rebase command. Then run git rebase --abort to revert it.