It there a way to make files opened for editing in the terminal open in Textedit instead? I mean, where a command might open a file for editing (like git commit), instead of opening that file in vi or emacs, it would open in Textedit (or perhaps another Textediting application of you choosing, such as Coda).
And as a bonus question, is there anyway to configure git to automatically open the file made after running git commit in an editor in the applications directory.
Set your editor to point to this program:
/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
With SVN, you should set SVN_EDITOR environment variable to:
$ export SVN_EDITOR=/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
And then, when you try committing something, TextEdit will launch.
Most programs will check the $EDITOR environment variable, so you can set that to the path of TextEdit in your bashrc. Git will use this as well.
Use git config --global core.editor mate -w or git config --global core.editor open as @dmckee suggests in the comments.
Reference: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config.html