Error related to editor when running git commit?

Question

I get the following error when running Git commit:

c:/Program/ Files/ /(x86/)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe: -c: line 0: syntax
 error near unexpected token `('
c:/Program/ Files/ /(x86/)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe: -c: line 0: `c:/Pr
ogram/ Files/ /(x86/)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe \$@\'
error: There was a problem with the editor 'c:/Program/ Files/ /(x86/)
/Notepad++/notepad++.exe'.
Please supply the message using either -m or -F option.

What does it mean? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

I was just running into this, and found your question trying to figure it out. I too assumed it needed escape characters for the spaces and parentheses IN .gitconfig, but apparently not. This statement worked for me:

editor = C:/Program Files (x86)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe

Which was created in my .gitconfig file by the below command:

git config --global core.editor /c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Notepad\+\+/notepad\+\+.exe

I had to remove the invalid line, before setting it with the above command would work.

Unfortunately, git commit still didn't work. Adding both Quotation marks and single quotes around it finally worked, launching the COMMIT_EDITMSG in my running Notepad++ window:

editor = "'C:/Program Files (x86)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe'"

Platform is Windows 8.1 Pro x64, the MINGW64/Bash shell, installed from the https://git-scm.com Windows client.

Answer 2

Looks like the prepare-commit-msg hook or the editor option in the gitconfig has a typo. You call c:/Program/ Files/ /(x86/)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe but you should have called c:/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe (use backslashes to escape space and bracket, not slash)