Git commit opens blank text file, for what?

Question

In all the Git tutorials I\'ve read they say that you can do:

git init
git add .
git commit

When I do that I get a big text file opened up.

Answer 1

Try Escape then ZZ, after you're done typing your message. As others have said when you run that commit command it actually runs a text editor to enter the message into. In my case (OS X) it was VI, which I figured out after some digging around. In that case, hit Escape to go into "command" mode (as opposed to INSERT mode) the enter ZZ. I'm sure there are other ways of accomplishing the task but that did it for me. Having never used VI or emacs it wasn't readily apparent to me and wasn't mentioned in any of the beginner guides I was using. Hopefully this helps.