[OT] Windows users: Are you happy with git?

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 18-05-2012 09:58, Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
> I remember back when we were considering whether to move DMD, Phobos and
> druntime from SVN on DSource to Git on GitHub, there were some concerns
> about using Git on Windows. People claimed that Git was a very
> Linux-centric tool, and that Windows support was buggy at best.

Linux-centric - yes. Buggy - no. msysgit (which is really what all Git 
packages on Windows are based on) has evolved a lot and is very high 
quality. I've used it on ~20 projects total by now, with all sorts of 
crazy hacks (git rerere, git rebase, git filter-branch) and it Just Works.

>
> Still, we made the switch, and I haven't really registered that many
> complaints since. So now I'm curious: Windows users, have you just
> resigned, or did Git actually turn out to work well on Windows?
> Specifically, is it usable from the CMD command line, and are graphical
> front-ends such as TortoiseGit any good? (I know running it through
> Cygwin works well, but that doesn't count.)
>
> -Lars

Git kinda-sorta works in cmd.exe, but I really wouldn't recommend it. 
Not only because cmd.exe just plain *sucks*, but also because it lacks a 
lot of features that tools designed for UNIX (such as Git) use. mintty 
is a great replacement.

I'm not a full-time Windows user, but when I do work on Windows, Git 
Bash and mintty work great for Git (note that Git Bash is really just 
bash.exe running inside cmd.exe).

BTW, running Git through Cygwin isn't all that much different from 
running it in Git Bash (msysgit). Both of those use cmd.exe as the 
'shell'. As I mentioned above, I would really recommend using mintty.

I would not recommend TortoiseGit, or Tortoise* in general. In my 
personal experience, they've been very good at screwing up repos because 
what I thought some action would do didn't match the command line term 
for the operation. It's great that GUIs try to make things intuitive, 
but it can certainly backfire on people who are used to the CLI.

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org