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Comment by gitgitgit | Hacker News Reader

I use Git via the GitHub Desktop client (https://desktop.github.com) and find it _very easy_ to use Git without issue by following a simple rule: don't be clever. I have branches, I commit, I squash merge via a Pull Request. No rebasing, no moving commits around. There might be workflows where rebasing etc. are important and certainly in those cases, using a GUI is probably not a great idea -- but it's certainly possible to use a GUI without issue if you keep your workflow simple.

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I squash locally, but learning to do that required learning vim. Fortunately vimtutor. Then my distro changed the default text editor launched from git... fortunately I knew enough to get by with that one - which might be emacs but I haven't verified.

Git is really weird but useful.

Git will use whatever editor you have defined in $EDITOR. You can also define this specifically for Git via global config (~/.gitconfig) if you don't want it to use your session's $EDITOR variable:

    [core]
       editor = vim

The default editor is usually configurable (of course you'd have to learn all the different contexts you can do this from first to know this is a thing ... discoverability is hard).

For example in ubuntu you can do

  sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Some programs will use the environment variable $EDITOR, so you can add this to your shell startup configs

  export EDITOR=vi

Or specifically for git cli you can run

  git config --global core.editor vi

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