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

For those of you using OS X I found this command to work well:
git config --global core.editor "open -t -W"

which will force git to open the default text editor (textedit in my case) and then wait for you to exit the application. Keep in mind that you need to "Save" and then "Quit" textedit before the commit will go through. There are a few other commands you can play around with as detailed on this page:

Apple Developer Library - Open Command

You can also try git config --global core.editor "open -e -W" if you want git to always open textedit regardless of what the default editor is.