How do I remove git's MERGE_MSG?

Question

I've tried a few things suggested, but nothing seems to remove it. This started occurring when I upgraded to Mountain Lion OS X. Anytime I do a git pull, it displays this annoying as heck empty editor with the title MERGE_MSG.

How do I prevent that from popping up globally across all my apps?

Answer 1

You can either pass --no-edit to git pull, or you can set the environment variable GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT to no.

From the git pull documentation:

   --edit, --no-edit
       Invoke an editor before committing successful mechanical merge to
       further edit the auto-generated merge message, so that the user can
       explain and justify the merge. The --no-edit option can be used to
       accept the auto-generated message (this is generally discouraged).
       The --edit option is still useful if you are giving a draft message
       with the -m option from the command line and want to edit it in the
       editor.

       Older scripts may depend on the historical behaviour of not
       allowing the user to edit the merge log message. They will see an
       editor opened when they run git merge. To make it easier to adjust
       such scripts to the updated behaviour, the environment variable
       GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT can be set to no at the beginning of them.