Nice intro. I had to go through this yesterday on a cloud instance and hadn’t used windows in awhile. Instead of using this install GUI I first installed chocolatey. Once that was ready from powershell it’s a quick ‘choco install git’.
Getting visual studio build tools wasn’t as easy (was compiling rust/c++ so had it as a dependency). I managed to avoid Internet explorer entirely by ‘choco install Firefox’ and then managed to go through the painful web workflow VS community edition download.
I really wonder how I managed on Windows for so long in my former career. It’s night and day vs Linux or Mac.
This article is from Jan 2022, I don't understand why the author didn't mention wsl. Even just to point out if it's lacking compared to gitbash. Can anyone chime in?
git bash is great.
with WSL2 I can use git directly, so I uninstalled git-bash and all those msys/cygwin/mingw, things changed, embrace WSL2, move on.
Git Bash is a nice tool. I used it for some time, and still do in some circumstances.
But when I wanted to have more and do more from the command-line re: a *nix-like dev experience on Windows for building native Windows software, I found my way to MSYS2[1]. Note that Git Bash is in parts based on MSYS2, but installing and using MSYS2 is not 1-1 with installing and using Git Bash:
At first I didn't quite understand what I was working with, but MSYS2's website provides the needed info, I just had to take the time to read it.
The History[2] page helped me understand better the relationships and differences between MSYS2, MSYS (not "2"), MinGW/-w64, and Cygwin. One of the more salient points being:
MSYS2 is an independent rewrite of MSYS, based on modern Cygwin and MinGW-w64 with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software ... MSYS2 is ideologically a successor to MSYS and MinGW. MSYS -- although definitely useful -- is really old and getting in the way of developers. MSYS2 was created to replace the original MSYS while avoiding its problems.
Another thing I appreciated was the explanation of MSYS2's environments[3]. Being able to painlessly switch away from MSVCRT to UCRT was helpful in solving some UTF-8 difficulties I was experiencing.
Package management with pacman[4] is rather pleasant, and the setup-msys2[5] GitHub Action makes it simple to provide your GHA workflow with the tools and libs you want.
Whenever I've encountered a problem or had a question I couldn't answer via web search, the community on the MSYS2 Discord server[6] has always been quick and happy to help.
[2] https://www.msys2.org/wiki/History/
[3] https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/
[4] https://www.msys2.org/docs/package-management/
[&] https://packages.msys2.org/queue
Can anyone paste a list of all the commands available from Git Bash? (not the bash builtins, but all the added programs)
how does git bash
versus
msys2?
E.g., with msys2 i can install sshd so that I can use a windows vm as a gitlab runner. I can also use pacman to install build deps.
Can i with git bash?
As a die hard unix fan being forced to work on Windows, git bash is a godsend.
Sure now you have WSL and countless other options but git bash is one click away and works surprisingly well.