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Asked: 2026-05-17T20:31:55+00:00

I’m trying to use MacVim as a default editor (on my Mac, obviously). I’d

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I’m trying to use MacVim as a default editor (on my Mac, obviously). I’d like to have MacVim to edit commit messages when I hg ci. Unfortunately when I do so (either by setting EDITOR=mvim or alias vi='mvim') MacVim pops up with an empty message (i.e. none of the boilerplate in the bottom half), and when I save that commit message I get the error “abort: empty commit message”.

Is there a way to use MacVim (presumably via mvim) to edit the commit messages when checking in changes with Mercurial?

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to reading the answers.

Brian

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  1. Editorial Team

    Set EDITOR='mvim -f', per the tip from the FAQ for making it work with Git:

    How can I use MacVim to edit Git commit messages?

    Add the following line to the file ~/.profile:

    export EDITOR='mvim -f -c "au VimLeave * !open -a Terminal"'

    The last part ensures that Terminal gets focus again after closing the commit message. (Note that you need to put the mvim script in your path for this to work.)

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