A recent post on Hacker News highlighted the benefits of detailed commit messages in git.
Usually, my git commits look something like this:
> git commit -m "fix: component missing configuration file"
…which isn’t all that helpful. (Related: see XKCD on git commit messages)
I decided to try and utilize this newfound knowledge in my own git commits and I quickly ran into an obstacle. Simply using > git commit opens up vim. Which, I really don’t want to use. (I’m sorry!)
This is something I should already know how to do, but I had to do a Google search to learn more. It turns out, you can change the default editor in git. This makes it much more convenient! How do you do it?
git config --global core.editor "nano"
Replace “nano” with your preferred editor of choice. Now, running > git commit opens up your editor and you can make detailed commit messages to your heart’s content!