How do I stop a Git commit when VI is on the screen waiting for a commit message?

I have asked Git to perform a commit from within git bash, It has brought up VI as it always does.

I now wish to cancel the commit, how do I prevent proceeding with the commit from this point?

You have two options:

• Provide an empty commit message. If it's a new commit and you haven't yet saved the message, you can simply use :q! (quit without saving). If you’ve already saved (or you're amending a previous commit), just delete the entire log message and save again. This can be done with ggdG + :wq in Vim.

• Have the editor exit with a non-zero exit code. In Vim, you can use :cq (quit with an error code).

It's worth noting that you can always reset your working copy to the state it was in before the commit with git reset HEAD^.

• :q! does not work when amending a commit. It does not update the commit message, but it executes the amendment :-(
• :cq completely aborts the amendment.

To sum up:

• When creating a new commit (i.e git commit) quit using :q!.
• When amending (i.e. git commit --amend) remove the commit message (only the first few rows not beginning with a #) for example by holding v and using arrow keys to select it and then pressing Delete. Quit with :wq to apply changes! If you use :q! the changes will be lost and the previous commit message will be used.

When using VIM it's ok in both cases to quit with :cq - VIM will quit with an error code and the commit will be aborted.

All answers are trying to teach you a bit of vim

but if you really have a problem closing a vim

you can have much more problems with the edition

and the situation will be repeated on every interaction in git

so you'd like to change a git editor

git config --global core.editor nano

git config --global core.editor <your_editor>

or learn editors like vim or emascs.