A colleague of mine had some nice improvements to gitvi.

Right now gitvi can be edited by itself, because the magic sequence $Hash$ is escaped like this

sed -i -e 's/\$[H]ash:.*\$/$H''ash$/' "$base"

(This was Ton's idea)

Some other improvements like a -m MSG switch which allows you to enter a commit message for all files you are editing.

And of course it then also needs to have a -h switch.

You can find the improved version here