Baffled by git

[andrewducker]

So, I figured that I should get the code for my firefox addon into a version control system of some kind, and that this would be a good time to take git for a test run.

So I do a git init, and a git add ., and then when I do a git commit I am presented with this image:


At which point I enter the text I want, and have _no_ idea what to do next. Pressing "Esc" doesn't pull up anything useful, there's no help that I can see in the manual for what to do next, and frankly, this leaves me completely stymied.

I assume that what I've got there is basically some kind of unix text editor that I've been dropped into, but as I haven't used anything like that since 1992, this is less than useful.

I would just start pressing random buttons, but I'd rather not mess this up, and I believe that git is one of these things that's very easy to fuck up if you go wandering off randomly.

Anyone care to point me in the right direction?

Edit: Had help from lovely people, and then worked out how to replace the editor with one I know.

Comments

Re: All you actually need to know about Vim

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

When other systems like git drop you into it, then effectively, one is forced to use it.

Re: All you actually need to know about Vim

[makyo.livejournal.com]

Most Unix-based utilities default to vi as their full-screen editor, for the simple reason that it's pretty much guaranteed to be there, whereas things like emacs or pico might not be. Almost all such utilities check the environment variables EDITOR and VISUAL first, and use whatever they're set to, only falling back to vi in the absence of any explicit instructions. So if you set them to point to your preferred editor, then you need never have to use vi again.