Add line break to git commit -m from command line on Windows

Question

My company has a policy that all checkins to a particular project must follow a specific multi-line template for git commits. How can I most simply create a single commit message that has multiple lines from the command line in Windows?

_{This is almost exactly a duplicate of "Add line break to git commit -m from command line" except that this question is specific to Windows/cmd.exe, while that question is related to bash.}

Answer 1

Either create a file that contains your commit message in the right format and use git commit -F <message_file>, after which you can continually edit and reuse that same file, or create a template file and use git commit -t <template_file> to open your editor with the pre-cooked template to be filled in. The second option can be made permanent by setting the commit.template configuration variable, so you don't need to use the -t ... bit on every commit. See the git commit manual page (git help commit, if your git is installed correctly, or search online) for more information.