Setting git editor in local MobaXterm terminal

Question

I currently use Git for Windows to teach bash and git. If possible I want to move to using the local MobaXterm terminal instead. One of the requirements I have is that we can change the default text editor from vim to a more user friendly option like nano or even MobaTextEditor.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to matter what I set git config --global core.editor to, or the EDITOR env variable to, git commit always ignores it and opens vim instead. It doesn't even give me an error, it just ignores the setting altogether.

I really want to move away from Git for Windows, but its not feasible to get a class full of newbies to use vim in the limited time we have. Does anyone know how to get another editor to work with git in MobaXterm's local terminal? Is there something simple I'm missing?

Answer 1

From the git documentation (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-var):

The order of preference is the $GIT_EDITOR environment variable, then core.editor configuration, then $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, and then the default chosen at compile time, which is usually vi.

From some reason, MobaXterm is setting GIT_EDITOR rather than EDITOR or VISUAL. Unset or change that variable.