Edit git commit message in a dedicated tab

Question

As an Atom user, I am used that when committing staged changes a new buffer is opened where I can edit the commit message. In particular, the advantages are:

• existing spell check is available
• I can provide a one line comment and an additional longer description
• I see a list of files to be committed (similar to the case when using the CLI)

What is the vscode equivalent? So far I found two options:

1. Command Palette -> Git: commit (staged)
2. Use the activity bar (where I see the staged files but still get a limited editing option of the commit message)

Answer 1

You could always specify VSCode as the editor to use when running git commit from the command line.

VSCode even has the --wait option : it waits until you close the opened buffer (not until you quit VSCode) :

GIT_EDITOR='code --wait' git commit

The main downside is that I don't know how to target a specific instance of VSCode to use if I have several open.