Question

Can I set git to show me the diffs while doing the interactive commit (i.e. no -m”msg”)

This would let me see what the changes are I am committing.

Answer 1

Try git commit -v

As it says in the git-commit manual page:

   -v , --verbose
          Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what would be
          committed at the bottom of the commit message template. Note
          that this diff output doesn’t have its lines prefixed with #.