I happened to be in my Windows 7 boot fixing a site in IE, so I decided
to try out "Git Extensions", that Git gui to see how well Git support is
in Windows.
Installation was nice, the Git Extensions installer also came with
mysgit and kdiff(?), which it would optionally install, since they're
important I let it install them.
The mysgit installation process was nice. It nicely asked for a
preference while installing on how to treat CRLFs, and explained each
option.
Installation had three options for shell, the third one had a warning,
something about replacing stuff... The second option seamed to be a
setup which was meant to play nice with users that like to use cygwin. I
chose the first option, bash.
mysgit seams to bundle a bash shell with it, it's easily accessible from
Git Extensions gui. The only downside is it doesn't seam to support
paste that I could find, however since you're not going to be using it
to do any cloning or anything that doesn't seam important. That aside,
the bash shell included has all the nice unixy goodies like ls, and
probably completion. And it does it without any of the cygwin messyness.
Git Extensions has a bundled plugin with support for GitHub, it sorta
works, sorta doesn't... Honestly, you don't really need it, just open up
your web browser, click the button to copy a repo url, and paste. You
don't need to use the Gui to make a pull request either.
I had a little awkwardness trying to get keys working, though most of
this was awkwardness with PuTTY, if you already have PuTTY setup you
shouldn't have as many issues. Just make sure to find the "Test
Connection" option in the "Manage Remotes" section of Git Extensions.
That was the only way I could find to get it to remember github's
identity key to stop that from causing errors when trying to do things.
It seamed to work a little better to clone a public repo using a
publicly accessible clone url, and then afterwards use the Manage
Remotes to tweak it to use a repo url you have push access to. Perhaps
there are less issues after you've cloned your first repo (that remote
identity key thing and all).
Git Extensions includes a manual with it, one about Git Extensions
itself. But I didn't look at the other options, I believe it has some
built in info on git as well.
Git Extensions also includes git's own git gui if you ever feel like
using it.
The built in git gui aside, Git Extensions includes just about every
option I could think of. Managing remotes, submodules, pushing and
pulling, commit, a good log view right in front of you, diff viewing,
bisect (what did that do again), all the merge options in pull right in
front of you, .......and on and on and on. It actually looks better and
has more than any of the screenshots I saw of it, perhaps I should make
my own overview and capture it a bit.
All in all... I think the support in Windows for git, especially if you
use Git Extensions, is good. Doesn't look like it's a good reason to
disqualify git anymore.
Also, since the bash shell is there, I think we can legitimately use
some custom scripts to help with dealing with piles of repos at once.
I'd probably pick python, ;) though theoretically you could write bash
scripts and use them on Windows with the Git Extensions setup.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]