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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

One of our hardware engineers uses Windows, and has been checking in schematics and other documents into a git repo. He's tried switching to Linux, but there are tools that only work on Windows.

I was pretty stunned to see just how Mac centric all attempts at making git usable was these days. I use linux full time and just hadn't been paying attention.

Thankfully github had this git for windows tool! Well, and then we had to install a newer version of the .NET runtime so he could update to an even newer vesion of the .NET runtime just to he could learn a UI that was pretty foreign from the git tool that I was used to.

I'm pretty amazed that we never found a build of git that just worked on powershell or cmd.exe. I've been teaching him with the "gitshell" that github has, but all the bashisms, the weird prompts..

Browsers have made cross platform tooling a ghetto. I'm not sure whether this is good or bad, but it was certainly a recent relevation for me.

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I've only ever used git from Windows. But I've used about four or five different clients. I've been surprised how awkward they all seem. The smoothest experience seems to be SourceTree from my experience. Most of them don't approach the level of polish and smooth experience that TortoiseSVN provided 10 years ago. I'm hoping this new client does better.

I have to agree that SourceTree provides the best Git experience on Windows (I've used quite a few GUIs on Windows, including Github's offering). That said, the weakest part is still the command line interface (but people on Windows are already used to it, or don't know what they're missing).

I agree. This is very sad state of affairs.

At my workplace I'm trying to drum up support for git, but the poor Windows tools are a hindrance.

I've been using posh-git[0] with powershell for some time now and it works pretty well after the initial setup (requires a git for windows download[1]).

[0]:https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git

[1]:http://git-scm.com/downloads

Github for Windows uses bash by default, but you can just go into the options and change the shell to cmd.exe. Git works fine with either.

The same is true of msysgit, etc. Although it ships with bash, you can just run "git" from the Windows command prompt and it will work just as well.

Git Extensions for Windows is pretty solid

https://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

For Linux, Git Cola is ok for commits and Git DAG is ok for browsing, but Git Extensions is better.

The default download from http://git-scm.com/downloads for Windows works if you select the right options in the installer.

If you want to use the command-line version of git on windows in cmd/powershell, the default installed of git does this. You just need to select the middle option on the wizard page that says something along the lines of:

* Use git bash only

* Put git in my path, so I can use it in powershell

* Completely break all my dependencies by putting a weird version of cygwin in my path

Git Shell runs natively on PowerShell and there's an option to make it run on cmd.exe in GitHub for Windows options, does that help?

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