This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. See linkgit:git-commit[1] for details. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).

A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times.

A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.

Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages.

A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit. See linkgit:git-commit[1] for details.