I unfortunately do a lot of my development on a Windows machine. To get access to real tools, I install Cygwin to get a Unix like shell and all the goodies I want.
Recently I installed it on my new laptop which worked as normal for most things. However, every time I’d try to do git commit I would get the following error:
$ git commit
hint: Waiting for your editor to close the file… Error detected while processing /usr/share/vim/vim91/filetype.vim:
...
After some <enter search engine verb here> I came across a suggestion that I might be using tiny vim. However opening Vim and typing :version, I got this:
:version
VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1 (2024 Jan 02, compiled Jan 27 2025 18:57:23)
Included patches: 1-1054
Modified by cygwin@cygwin.com
Compiled by cygwin@cygwin.com
Huge version without GUI. Features included (+) or not (-):
...
But that looks right. So I listed the configuration for git to see what editor it was using:
$ git config --global --get core.editor
Nothing was listed. So I tried the commit again and looked at the version of Vim that git was using.
:version
VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1 (2024 Jan 02, compiled Jan 27 2025 18:54:09)
Included patches: 1-1054
Modified by cygwin@cygwin.com
Compiled by cygwin@cygwin.com
Tiny version without GUI. Features included (+) or not (-):
...
Well there it is. It is defaulting to the tiny version. So I set the core.editor to the proper Vim and all is good in my current little bubble of the world.
$ git config --global core.editor "vim"
$ git config --global --get core.editor
vim