Using Sublime Text to write your git commit messages

Here’s another blog post about setting up a dev environment. (I’m using OSX 10.10.)

GitHub recommends using the following command in your terminal to set the default editor in Git to use Sublime Text.

git config --global core.editor "subl -n -w"

But wait! What if our subl symlink isn't set up for whatever reason?

First, I tried:
git config --global core.editor "open -a 'Sublime Text.app'"
..but quickly ran into an error whenever I ran git commit: "Aborting commit due to empty commit message."

Realizing that I needed to still add the -n and -w tags, I instead tried:
git config --global core.editor "open -W -n -a 'Sublime Text.app'"
..which didn't work very well. I thought the open command's -W and -n flags would work just like the -n -w flags for Sublime Text, but that just wasn't the case. I got similar, but very wonky behavior compared to what I was expecting. After poking around the documentation for the open command further, I found out I could send arguments directly to the application.

For my final (successful) attempt, I used:
git config --global core.editor "open -a '/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl' --args -n -w"

This works for Sublime Text 3 and throws in the -n -w tags directly to the application via the --args tag. This is essentially equivalent to the subl -n -w that GitHub suggests, without setting up a symlink.

Lessons learned: Symlinks are awesome and not using them makes your life difficult because the open command does weird stuff.