Git shell Windows tips

Requirements

See Getting started with Git shell on Windows before reading this article.

Tips

Fix terminal warning

With some commands, like less or git log you can get this annoying warning

WARNING: terminal is not fully functional
-  (press RETURN)

You can fix it setting the environment variable TERM=msys. Make it permanent adding it to your .bash_profile, for instance

echo export TERM=msys >> $HOME/.bash_profile; source $HOME/.bash_profile

Better vim colors

Vim is default editor for git. Every time you commit without a message, it will be open a vim session to let you write, but, on Windows git shell vim colors are .. well let me translate literally from italian .. really unwatchable!

Create a colors folder and grab your favourite color scheme, for instance desert. Then configure vim to use it.

mkdir /share/vim/vim73/colors
curl -o /share/vim/vim73/colors/desert.vim https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/runtime/colors/desert.vim
echo colorscheme desert >> $HOME/_vimrc

If you use vim as editor for everything, like me, you can use this trick. Since git shell uses vim73, and of course I have vim74 I added this to the bottom of my _vimrc

if version < 704
  colorscheme desert
endif

So I can change colorscheme on my vim74, without the need to update msysgit /share/vim/vim73/colors folder.

Folder structure

I use to create a site.com folder in my $HOME dir, so when I open the git shell I can see a folder structure that tells me in which site the repo is hosted, so for example I have

• github.com/
• bitbucket.org/
• code.google.com/

GitHub folder

Inside the ~/github.com/ folder I like to follow the same structure GitHub has serverside, so I have many user/repo folders

• github.com/
  • joyent/node
  • twbs/bootstrap
  • fibo/dflow
  • fibo/iper
  • fibo/mocha
  • visionmedia/mocha
  • visionmedia/express

that is useful cause I can differ from original to forked repo.

GitHub clone utility

I use mainly GitHub to host my repos. I have many repos, and I use more than one location. If you are in the same situation you will find handy to add a bash function to clone quickly a repo of yours.

I use to put my repos in ~/github.com/<MY_USER_NAME> folder.

Set github.user in your git config

git config --global github.user "fibo"

Now, if you add this function to your .bash_profile

GITHUB_DIR=$HOME/github.com
GITHUB_USER=$(git config github.user)

function clone () {
  REPO_NAME=$1

  TARGET_DIR=$GITHUB_DIR/$GITHUB_USER
  mkdir -p $TARGET_DIR

  # Choose one of the following lines as $REPO_URL
  REPO_URL=git@github.com:${GITHUB_USER}/${REPO_NAME}.git
  #REPO_URL=https://github.com/${GITHUB_USER}/${REPO_NAME}

  cd $TARGET_DIR
  git clone ${REPO_URL}
  cd $REPO_NAME
}

you will be able to clone repo foo and cd into it just launching

clone foo

Tricks

Enter /usr/lib folder

There seem to be a /usr folder, if you launch

$ perl -e 'print join "\n", @INC'
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/msys
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/msys
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl
.

but it cannot be listed if you launch ls /. Anyway, you can enter it even if autocompletion will not work, just launch

cd /usr/lib

Bypass restrictive firewall settings

If you are behind a firewall that does not allow connections on port 22 (that’s my case at my job place), when you try to clone a repo you can get an error message like this

ssh: connect to host github.com port 22: Bad file number
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

To work around it, you need to edit file $HOME/.ssh/config. For example, if you need to clone a repo from GitHub add this content.

Host github.com
  Hostname ssh.github.com
  Port 443

For more information see: Using SSH over the HTTPS port.

Goodies

cURL

Git shell gives you the awesome curl command on Windows!

curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, Telnet and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

find

Git shell gives you the power of find command-line utility on Windows!