How do I make git use the editor of my choice for commits?

I would prefer to write my commit messages in Vim, but git is opening them in Emacs.

How do I configure git to always use Vim? Note that I want to do this globally, not just for a single project.

If you want to set the editor only for Git, do either (you don’t need both):

• Set core.editor in your Git config: git config --global core.editor "vim"

OR

• Set the GIT_EDITOR environment variable: export GIT_EDITOR=vim

If you want to set the editor for Git and also other programs, set the standardized VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables*:

export VISUAL=vim
export EDITOR="$VISUAL"

NOTE: Setting both is not necessarily needed, but some programs may not use the more-correct VISUAL. See VISUAL vs. EDITOR.

Some editors require a --wait flag, or they will open a blank page. For example:

• Sublime Text (if correctly set up; or use the full path to the executable in place of subl):

  export VISUAL="subl --wait"

• VS Code (after adding the shell command):

  export VISUAL="code --wait"

Copy paste this:

git config --global core.editor "vim"

In case you'd like to know what you're doing. From man git-commit:

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from the GIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration variable, the VISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment variable (in that order).

On Ubuntu and also Debian (thanks @MichielB) changing the default editor is also possible by running:

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Which will prompt the following:

There are 4 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor).

  Selection    Path                Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0            /bin/nano            40        auto mode
  1            /bin/ed             -100       manual mode
  2            /bin/nano            40        manual mode
* 3            /usr/bin/vim.basic   30        manual mode
  4            /usr/bin/vim.tiny    10        manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 

In windows 7, while adding the "Sublime" editor it was still giving me an error:

Aborting commit due to empty commit message.

Sublime was not able to keep the focus.

To fix this I opened the .gitconfig file in c:/users/username/ folder and added the following line with --wait option outside the single quotes.

[core]
      editor = 'F:/Program Files/Sublime Text 2/sublime_text.exe' --wait

Hope its helpful to somebody facing similar issue with Sublime.

In Windows 7, setting editor to Notepad++

• Open any text editor.
• Open this file: C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\.gitconfig
• Add this section to the bottom:

For 64 bit Notepad++ use:

[core]
    editor = 'C:/Program Files/Notepad++/notepad++.exe' -multiInst -notabbar

For 32 bit Notepad++ use:

[core]
    editor = 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe' -multiInst -notabbar

• Save and close the file.
• When you're committing with git, just write git commit and press Enter. It will pop open Notepad++.
• Write your commit message at the top of the file, and save and close the file. Done!