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One thing I've found nano useful for: git commit messages. If the commit file is empty, that cancels the commit. Nano will tell me how many lines it actually w

One thing I've found nano useful for: git commit messages. If the commit file is empty, that cancels the commit. Nano will tell me how many lines it actually wrote, so if I have second thoughts I can cancel with certainty. Nano may well not be unique in that regard, but I tripped over another editor that saved what I thought was an empty file as a single line with just the EOL character.

jolmg 5y ago
You can have a bunch of comments and empty lines, even with spaces, and git will still abort if you don't have anything else in the commit message. An EOL/newline character shouldn't cause the commit to continue.
- chungy 5y ago
  There are overrides to make empty messages or including otherwise-comments, but yeah... you have to do such things rather explicitly. No way you can do it by accident.
  - jolmg 5y ago
    But none accept a single newline as a message while at the same time rejecting truly empty messages.
hiq 5y ago
I rarely write commit messages until they're ready, so I usually :q! when I realize I actually don't want to commit just yet.
MayeulC 5y ago
I like to quit vim with a non-zero return value in some exceptional cases. git and most other tools will interpret this as "something bad happened" and won't do anything further :cq