Sometimes, you may want to edit the message of a commit. Perhaps you're making "temporary" commits and cleaning them up later, or you're responding to feedback from a code review.

If you want to change the contents of a commit (i.e the code itself), see Editing an old commit's contents.

To specify which editor is opened to update the commit message, follow the instructions at How do I make git use the editor of my choice for commits?

To update the content of a commit message, simply use the git reword command:

$ git reword my-branch
# or
$ git reword abc123

You can also pass -m/--message to specify the commit message inline:

$ git reword my-branch -m 'update some code'

You can also update multiple commit messages at once. This can be useful if you are updating common information (such as a ticket number) or have a lot of temporary commits.

Pass multiple branches or commit IDs to git reword and it will open all of their commit messages in the same window:

$ git reword my-branch-1 my-branch-2 my-branch-3

You can also use revsets to specify commits in a more ergonomic way. For example, to specify all commits in the current commit stack, use the stack() revset function:

$ git reword 'stack()'  # expands to all commits in the current commit stack