About six months ago, I started using Git through the CLI rather than through a GUI. I did not really have a reason for doing this other than the desire to know more about the tools I use day to day. My Git-fu is still weak, but it is getting better.

I recently decided that my Git CLI experience would be greatly approved with the aid of spellcheck. Luckily, I stumbled across a post detailing how one can enable spellcheck in Vim (my default editor). Unluckily, it did not work for me with Yosemite’s default version of Vim in Terminal. After struggling with this for a bit, I finally decided to upgrade to the latest version of Vim via Homebrew:

$ brew install vim

After installing the latest version of Vim, I created my ~/.vimrc (I am guessing this is not created by default as I did not see it on my machine) with the following content:

set backspace=2
syntax on
autocmd Filetype gitcommit setlocal spell textwidth=72

The first line enables what I believe to be the correct behavior of the Backspace (Delete on Mac) key: while in insert mode, the character immediately to the left of the cursor is removed and the cursor moves to that position (along with the text shifting to the left). I stumbled across a post indicating that this is not the default behavior in Vim, but it is the behavior I expect.

The second line turns on syntax highlighting. What I found to be unique about this feature is that it will actually highlight your Git commit message in such a way that the “title” of your message is highlighted to indicate when your title is too long (the recommended length, according to Github, is 50 characters). It also helps highlight comments in your commit messages.

The third line is the “money” line. This line enables spellcheck for gitcommit files. This line also includes a nice little extra to wrap our commit message bodies at 72 characters per line, which is the recommended length according to Github.

One other little tidbit I came across is you can use the following to ensure that Git uses your preferred editor (meaning the version of Vim I have installed via Homebrew):

$ git config --global --replace-all core.editor $(which vim) -f

I am not sure if this change is strictly necessary; it may just be belts and suspenders, but I would rather be safe than sorry.

If you want to know more about my setup, be sure to follow along under my Environment section.