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Comment by gfody | Hacker News Reader

Git doesn't transplant from the UNIX ecosystem very well. It's why the only options for Git in Windows so far have been as part of a UNIX interop solution like msys, cygwin, interix, etc.

It will be really nice to see a proper Git client for Windows especially if it means Windows is also getting a proper SSH.

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I've been using git on Windows for years, and while the need for msys stuff is a little clunky, I've never had any problems using it. In fact, the built-in gui tools (git-gui and gitk) work WAY better on Windows than they do on OSX.

libgit2 will eventually make it possible to make a nice GUI client without shelling out to git itself. GitHub for Mac and GitHub for Windows both use it now, and it's way better than parsing shell output.

I've been using git on windows as well and it works for sure but it's obviously not a native windows tool. It doesn't integrate with any windows stuff (credential management, indexing service, scripting objects, etc.) it brings all of its own stuff from the unix world (ssh, grep, bash, etc) and depending how you set it up all of those things run in a weird emulation sandbox (where's your .ssh/config? your .bashrc, .gitconfig?). If you use egit in eclipse and msysgit you probably have had to copy your ssh keys and host settings in two places. When I use it from the command line I'm switching between windows and unix style paths (msys and cygwin both have a path wrapper utility but I'm using git on SUA for best performance).

I think a proper windows git would entail a proper windows ssh where your keys and host settings are managed in one place in the control panel or something (or at least %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\config) and would have a seamless integration with explorer and the filesystem so that other tools can leverage it transparently similar to how ssh is used transparently by so many unix tools.

Git on Windows works fine for me, no cygwin in sight. It wouldn't have occurred to me to call msys 'part of a Unix interop solution', though I suppose it does give me a working version of Perl, which is a feature since it was the occasion for me to start using ack instead of grep.

Definitely UNIX interop, at least at the tooling level:

> MSYS is a collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep to allow building of applications and programs which depend on traditionally UNIX tools to be present.

[0]: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

You can use git from PowerShell and it works almost as well as using bash.

Only downside is you have to convert scripts you find online from bash -> powershell

Converting scripts does sound like a serious down side. Are there any automation tools that could help?

It's not as bad as it sounds, and you don't have to do it for all scripts.

1) Most scripts will work, you just have to tweak how loops are written and the way you declare functions. 2) If the script uses basic commands like ls, mkdir, etc their are powershell aliases built in already that point to the equivalent PS command.

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