git rebase --editor=/something/other/than/vim? (for easier squashing)

Question

I happily use vim as my default editor for commits, and do not wish to change it. However, when it comes to rebasing, I find myself squashing dozens and dozens of commits which I find much easier with an interactive editor like Textwrangler (substituting "pick" with "squash" in all but the top commit).

Is there any way to specify an alternate editor for a one-off rebase command?

I know in vim I can do:

:%s/pick/squash/

but that has its own minor annoyances.

EDIT - as stated in the comments, you can squash all but the top commit very efficiently by going to the 2nd line and executing

:,$s/pick/squash/

(note the comma and dollar are different to the original)

Solution 1

Try adding the GIT_EDITOR environment variable before your command, like so:

GIT_EDITOR=<editor of choice> git rebase <...>

For example, to use nano I would type:

GIT_EDITOR=nano git rebase -i abcdef1234

Solution 2

There is an even better option for all your interactive rebase.

https://github.com/sjurba/rebase-editor

It is a custom CLI app written in node specifically for interactive rebase.

To install:

npm install -g rebase-editor
git config --global sequence.editor rebase-editor 

Or with yarn:

yarn global add rebase-editor
git config --global sequence.editor rebase-editor 

Comments

[Sridhar Sarnobat]

Since you aren't exporting it, does that variable value get reset when the command terminates? (that would be ideal, but I'm guessing you need to reset it manually)

[Rob Bajorek]

The variable is only set for that one command invocation. Try running git rebase again without GIT_EDITOR and you'll use your default editor again.

[Sridhar Sarnobat]

Awesome, this is the right answer then. Though I think my fears of learning a bit more vim were irrational

[MarkHu]

Awesome indeed. For some reason my ancient server-side OS defaulted to vi instead of vim --so now I know how to perma-fix this.

[Antony Stubbs]

dang this tool is awesome sauce

[Bobby Axe]

This helped me a lot thanks, i believe a lot of people are looking for GIT_EDITOR=nano git rebase -i @~9 this will show your last nine commits and you should be able to modify them.

[EddyXorb]

For visual code use GIT_EDITOR="code --wait" git rebase -i abfa452

[Dan Ciborowski - MSFT]

This tool is now required part of my setup. Being able to select each action with the single press of a key makes "git rebase" a teachable process.