Use Visual Studio Code as Your Default Text Editor for Git

Single-line commit messages in git are easy from the command line:

git commit -m "<SOME_MESSAGE>"

But what about multi-line commit messages?

If you’re comfortable with vi, which is what git uses by default when you run git commit, then that’s fine. But I prefer to use a GUI text editor such as vscode.

I stumbled upon this stackoverflow thread recently that did just what I needed. I’ve consolidated the top answer and relevant comments.

This line will make git use vscode as the default text editor. The --wait option will wait for the vscode window to be closed before returning control to the command line.

git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

Then, use this snippet to edit your global config settings in vscode.

git config --global -e