GitPad: Write your commits in Notepad
For many developers getting started with Git on Windows, one of the confusing features of Git is that the default editor for commit messages is Vim. While Vim is a…
For many developers getting started with Git on Windows, one of the confusing features of Git is that the default editor for commit messages is Vim. While Vim is a great editor, many folks would prefer something a bit more user-friendly.
For those folks, we’ve created a great getting-started resource, GitPad. This is a portable, single-EXE program that will configure Notepad as your default editor for commit messages and other features such as interactive rebase, which lets you reorder and combine commits before you send them to others.

If you’re interested, grab GitPad.exe from the Download page and run it, then restart your CMD / Bash shell window.
Written by
Related posts
The future of AI-powered software optimization (and how it can help your team)
We envision the future of AI-enabled tooling to look like near-effortless engineering for sustainability. We call it Continuous Efficiency.
Let’s talk about GitHub Actions
A look at how we rebuilt GitHub Actions’ core architecture and shipped long-requested upgrades to improve performance, workflow flexibility, reliability, and everyday developer experience.
GitHub Availability Report: November 2025
In November, we experienced three incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.