Using Sublime Text as your Git Editor

Key Takeaways

hi there this is Daniel uh today I wanted to give you a quick demonstration of how you can use Sublime Text as your git editor um what that means is uh whenever you make a commit in git from the command line using the git command uh what will happen is that Sublime Text is going to pop up and you can actually edit your commit message within Sublime Text which um I found a lot more convenient because Sublime Tex is really the editor that uh I used the most that I'm the most comfortable with so naturally I wanted to use it for my git workflow as well and I'm going to show you real quick how that all works so what I'm going to do now is just uh jump into my shell here and um create a new git repository just an empty git repository and then um we also want to create uh some file.txt and uh maybe add some content content into that file all right so now we've got some file txt and um I'm going to add that file to git now I've got a new file some file txt and now uh the interesting bit here is that I'm going to configure git to use Sublime Text as my editor and the way you do that is is um by exporting a new um shell variable that is uh Gore editor and we set it to uh the suble command that will uh start or uh launch uh Sublime Text um and and make it the focused window and we'll tell it to wait um before it returns because that's necessary uh in the way the the git command wants to use the editor and it will also tell it to to create a new window because I found uh that's a little bit more convenient than just uh it opening a new tab so I'm going to run this which will uh create that new variable and uh git is going to reference that variable and then use Supply text as its editor so when I go and create a new commit now it uh is going to launch subblime text so as I hit return Sublime text pops up and we're in this temporary uh file here uh that's skit Sublime SL dogit commit edit message that's just a temporary file where our commit message is going to go into and then we can just say um hi there this is the initial commit right and it's going to ignore all of the commented out stuff here it's basically just going to take the first line and because of the way I've got my gutter set up here um it also Al tells me how much space I have left for a well formatted and well styled kid message so anyway I'm going to hit save here and then I just close that window by hitting command W or we could also click the x button here so what's happened now is that get um uh get notied that the suble command um exited now and um it created the commit just like we wanted so when I pull up git log I can actually see that commit here and we can see um that my text is in here as well just like I want it um just maybe uh a quick reminder you probably want to put this export command into your uh shell profile so that you don't have to enter it every single time and uh you want to make sure that your suble command is actually configured correctly right so you got to make sure that suble command uh exists and uh that's something that comes with Sublime Text but it's also something you need to configure or uh basically link up in your path and then you want to export that git editor variable all right that's all there is to it uh I hope that helped you out and uh talk to you soon