The man page says
ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from the GIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration variable, the VISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment variable (in that order). |
So in order to make nano our default editor we can do
git config --global core.editor "nano" |
--global means this will become a default setting for all of git (leaving it out would only affect the current git repo you are running the command from)