Git interactive rebase without opening the editor

Question

Git allows certain commands to create or modify commits without opening the editor first, for example:

git commit --amend --no-edit git commit --fixup=HEAD^ 

I have set rebase.autosquash to true, so that the todo list for an interactive rebase is automatically reordered. Is there a way to immediately perform the rebase, without opening the editor first, something like:

git rebase -i --no-edit HEAD~3 

Answer 1

TL;DR answer: GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR=: git rebase -i HEAD~3

You can't stop git rebase --interactive from running the "sequence editor" (that's the edit command on the "sequence file" containing the various pick, etc., commands). However, if you examine the interactive rebase script:

$ vim $(git --exec-path)/git-rebase--interactive 

you'll find code like this near line 230 or so:

git_sequence_editor () {     if test -z "$GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR"     then         GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR="$(git config sequence.editor)"         if [ -z "$GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR" ]         then             GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR="$(git var GIT_EDITOR)" || return $?         fi     fi      eval "$GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR" '"$@"' } 

Thus, you simply need to set the sequence editor to an "edit" command that does nothing and then succeeds, such as the shell's built-in : command, or the true command.

(Any of $GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR, the configured sequence.editor, or $GIT_EDITOR will suffice for this, though the obvious best one to use is the first.)

Answer 2

Instead of using the GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR environment variable, you can use -c to pass configuration to git:

git -c sequence.editor=: rebase --autosquash --interactive origin/master 

Works well for triggering editor-free rebases from within your editor (i.e., using fugitive's :Git command in vim).