I’ve been cleaning up my Vim config this week, and I noticed some strange errors while doing an interactive rebase in my dotfiles repository.

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Error detected while processing modelines:
line    1:
E518: Unknown option: <some text from the first commit message>

Because of the way I format commit messages for my dotfiles, the first line of the file presented during an interactive rebase was being interpreted as a modeline. I was hoping there was a command line option or something that I could use to disable modelines, but as far as I can tell, you have to do it in your .vimrc.

This isn’t likely to be a problem for most people, as I don’t imagine there are many that have vim: at the beginning of their commit messages. However if you run into this problem, you can solve it by adding the following to an appropriate place in your .vimrc

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autocmd FileType gitrebase setlocal nomodeline