@joeyh @liw Yeah, not sure either, I just end up continuing to enter text and then amend the commit.
I guess if git commits would be expensive I would have setup git to use ed(1) so I could still easily copy-paste from the terminal log rather than having to background the editor multiple times.

Also people can entirely set $EDITOR to their usual GUI text editor (I guess over ssh you'd need some kind of agent, but ssh without being able to use something like nano seems weird to me).