Git commit in terminal opens VIM, but can’t get back to terminal

command-line-interfacecommitgitterminalvim

Trying to learn GitHub at the moment and doing this Git essentials tutorial over at nettuts. I'm on the lesson about making commits.

The teacher types git commit and it opens VIM as his editor (I'd also like to know how to make it open up in Sublime Text 2 instead) anyways it opens in VIM and I add in 1 line saying this is my first commit and hit save.

Next it then prompts me to save the output to the desktop, something I did not see in his screencast. Now I'm still in VIM and not sure how to get back to 'normal' terminal 🙁

I couldn't figure it out so I just exited the terminal and relaunched it, did git commit again and had some warning messages about duplicates! Not sure if I need to (E)edit anyways or (A)abort.

git status

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vim

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message when I reopen terminal and do git commit again

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Best Answer

To save your work and exit press Esc and then :wq (w for write and q for quit).

Alternatively, you could both save and exit by pressing Esc and then :x

To set another editor run export EDITOR=myFavoriteEdioron your terminal, where myFavoriteEdior can be vi, gedit, subl(for sublime) etc.

Related Solutions

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

You can undo git add before commit with

git reset <file>

which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

You can use

git reset

without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset

Git – Commit only part of a file in Git

You can use git add --patch <filename> (or -p for short), and git will begin to break down your file into what it thinks are sensible "hunks" (portions of the file). It will then prompt you with this question:

Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,/,j,J,g,s,e,?]?

Here is a description of each option:

y stage this hunk for the next commit
n do not stage this hunk for the next commit
q quit; do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining hunks
a stage this hunk and all later hunks in the file
d do not stage this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
g select a hunk to go to
/ search for a hunk matching the given regex
j leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
J leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
k leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
K leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
s split the current hunk into smaller hunks
e manually edit the current hunk
- You can then edit the hunk manually by replacing +/- by # (thanks veksen)
? print hunk help

If the file is not in the repository yet, you can first do git add -N <filename>. Afterwards you can go on with git add -p <filename>.

Afterwards, you can use:

git diff --staged to check that you staged the correct changes
git reset -p to unstage mistakenly added hunks
git commit -v to view your commit while you edit the commit message.

Note this is far different than the git format-patch command, whose purpose is to parse commit data into a .patch files.

Reference for future: Git Tools - Interactive Staging

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

Git – Commit only part of a file in Git

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