Git "cannot spawn interactive-rebase-tool" and "unable to start editor 'interactive-rebase-tool'" when running "rebase -i"

When running "git rebase -i" in git bash, no text editor window pops up and the following messages are produced

hint: Waiting for your editor to close the file... error: cannot spawn 
interactive-rebase-tool: No such file or directory

error: unable to start editor 'interactive-rebase-tool'

I'm using the default editor, Vim. Committing works fine so far.

The Git version is 2.40.0.windows.1 and the Windows OS version is 10.0.19045.

I have tried searching for "interactive-rebase-tool", both for files on my hard drive and for information on the Internet, but to no avail. Rebooting and reinstalling Git didn't help, either.

Solution

You checked your configuration, and it turns out you have the following setting:

$ git config --list | grep interactive-rebase-tool
sequence.editor=interactive-rebase-tool

This is the root cause of your issues: with this setting, git will try to launch a program named interactive-rebase-tool when you run git rebase -i -- and obviously you don't have one.

Remove this setting.

Check where this specific setting comes from:

git config --show-scope sequence.editor

The scope will probably say "local" or "global". To remove this setting :

# local:
git config --unset sequence.editor
# global:
git config --global --unset sequence.editor

(you can have a look at git help config for extensive documentation on git config)