magit-notes-mode

magit-notes-mode: the note attached to one commit, as an editable buffer. C-c C-c saves, C-c C-k closes without saving; clearing the buffer removes the note.

On this page

A git note is a scrap of text attached to a commit after the fact — review comments, a ticket link, "this is the one that broke CI". The commit's SHA never changes, so notes are how you annotate history without rewriting it.

This buffer is one commit's note, editable. C-c g T T opens it, or :magit-note-edit <commit>.

new note                    a1b2c3d  Jane Doe  3 days ago  Fix the thing
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Reviewed by Sam. The retry loop here is load-bearing — see #412 before
touching it.

The headerline says which commit and whether you are creating or overwriting. That matters more here than in other magit buffers: the body is bare text with nothing in it naming what it is attached to, so a note written against the wrong commit would look exactly like one written against the right one.

Chords

Chord	Action
`C-c C-c`	Save the note
`C-c C-k`	Close without saving

Editing is ordinary vim — this is one of the few magit buffers that is not read-only, because typing in it is the point.

Behaviour worth knowing

Clearing the buffer removes the note. An empty note is not a thing git stores, so saving an empty buffer is how you delete one. Doing that on a commit that never had a note is not an error either.
Saving overwrites. The buffer was seeded with the existing note, so refusing to replace it would refuse every edit after the first.
The buffer closes as soon as the write is kicked off, not when it finishes — the same optimistic close magit-commit-mode makes. A failure is logged rather than reported back into a buffer that has gone.
You never see $EDITOR. git notes edit would open one, which inside an editor means a child process waiting on a terminal that isn't there. This buffer is the editor.

Where notes show up

Nowhere special — git show prints them by default, so a commit's note appears under its message in the revision view with no extra step.

The notes menu (`C-c g T`)

Key	Action
`T`	Edit the note on a commit — opens this buffer
`r`	Remove the note from a commit
`m`	Merge another notes ref into this one
`p`	Prune notes whose commit no longer exists — asks first

T and r need a commit. From a magit buffer with one under the cursor they use it; from anywhere else they open the commit picker — the same way A / _ / O behave.

r does not ask, and p does. Removing one note loses only that note and it is one T away from being retyped; prune drops an unbounded number and names none of them.

Merging notes

Notes live on a ref (refs/notes/commits by default), and two clones can grow different notes for the same commit. m opens a picker of refs to merge in — every branch, remote-tracking ref and tag the repository has — optionally with a strategy:

Strategy	Resolution
`manual` (default)	Stop on a conflict and let you resolve it
`ours` / `theirs`	Keep one side
`union`	Concatenate both
`cat_sort_uniq`	Concatenate, sort, drop duplicates

:magit-note-merge refs/notes/other theirs is the scriptable form. A misspelled strategy is refused rather than quietly falling back to manual — ours and theirs resolve in opposite directions, and a silent fallback would stop a merge you asked to resolve.

A manual conflict leaves the merge in progress, and C-c g T then shows only the two ways out:

Key	Action
`c`	Commit the merge, keeping the resolved notes
`a`	Abort, restoring the notes ref

The menu is gated the same way B bisect is: outside a merge those two error, so showing them would be showing rows that fail when pressed.

Not here

The four configure rows magit has (c / d / C / D, setting core.notesRef and notes.displayRef) are absent. They are transient variable rows — a menu row that renders a config value and edits it in place — which lattice's transients don't have, the same gap that makes remote URLs a buffer rather than a menu. Per-repo git config is more likely to end up under :customize than in a hand-rolled menu.