Hi Mara,
I apologize for the lag in my response! I was traveling for the holidays, and I've been away from my computer. Anyhow, I've made commits to GitHub before as part of a Software Carpentry class, but in a previous version of RStudio and R. I just went through the instructions in Ch.17 of Happy Git with a small text file. I was able to commit, edit, and then push to my repository without issue. One thing that I noticed is that took a while to stage my tiny text file. Is it possible that I'm just not waiting long enough? Also, I've attempted to do this several times and there seems to be variability in how many files are staged before it freezes.
I'm in a R4DS Slack group, and I've noticed that other uses have had similar problems:
"I do have the same issue. When I make a commit on the terminal in Rstudio, it works well but when I try to amend a commit, it freezes. What I do is to open my own terminal, navigate to the project, then make my git amend. Or sometimes, I open the shell outside Rstudio from Rstudio."
"I had the same issue; what I do now is 1). serve the site 2.) commit the post file from the R studio; 3) then from the shell or terminal try git commit -a -m "your message". 4) push the changes. 2 & 3 may be duplicate but it works for me. Hope it helps"
I'll try find links to the RStudio support pages that I thought might be relevant. Thanks and happy New Year!
Best,
SFB