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

I was confused because I kept trying to enter a filename after the :w in VIM. That doesn't trigger the commit. Instead I kept getting a message "Aborting commit due to empty commit message." Don't put a filename after the :w. :w saves the file to .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG by default. Then :q to exit to complete the commit. You can see the results with git log.