Re: Remove help advice text from git editors for interactive rebase and reword

[Alexei Lozovsky <a.lozovsky@gmail.com>]

On 23 July 2017 at 13:03, Kirill Likhodedov wrote:
> Hello,
>
> is it possible to remove the helping text which appears at the bottom
> of the Git interactive rebase editor (the one with the list of
> instructions)

I believe currently there is not way to do it. The interactive rebase
is implemented in git-rebase--interactive.sh which always makes a call
to append_todo_help to append the help text to the todo list of commits.

> and the one which appears at the bottom of the commit editor (which
> appears on rewording a commit or squashing commits)?

This one too seems to be hardcoded in builtin/commit.c.

> I can parse and strip out the help pages (but it is not very reliable
> since the text may change in future)

I doubt the syntax of the interactive rebase todo list will ever change,
so you can reliably remove all lines that are empty or start with the
$(git config --get core.commentchar) or '#' if that's empty or 'auto'.

However, it's harder with the commit messages during --amend as the
comment character is not really fixed and can be dynamically selected
to not conflict with the characters used in the commit message if the
core.commentchar is set to 'auto'.

> However I suppose that experienced command line users could also
> benefit from such configuration, since this helping text is intended
> only for newbies and is more like a noise for advanced users.

Well, the text is appended to the todo list of commits, so not that it
gets too much in the way of editing the list by humans.