I installed Github for Windows which comes with the Git command line client, and whenever I forget a switch or something and want to use --help, instead of dumping to the console it's launching a browser. Is there a way to ask Git to dump the help to the console (as it does in most Unixen by default) instead of launching a browser?
In windows
git <command> -h
will write help to the terminal output
git <command> --help
will pop up a browser window
This is a frail workaround, but if you just want a quick usage summary, feed the git sub-command of your choice a deliberately bad option name. I tried "--halp". For example:
$ git stash --halp
error: unknown option for 'stash save': --halp
To provide a message, use git stash save -- '--halp'
usage: git core\git-stash list [<options>]
or: git core\git-stash show [<stash>]
or: git core\git-stash drop [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]
or: git core\git-stash ( pop | apply ) [--index] [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]
or: git core\git-stash branch <branchname> [<stash>]
or: git core\git-stash [save [--patch] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-q|--quiet]
[-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [<message>]]
or: git core\git-stash clear
I can't say for sure that "halp" will always be rejected, but it seems to get the job done. Hopefully it'll never get interpreted as a usable parameter. This is probably better than random typing, for example, since you might randomly type in correct input.
For Linux systems you could set this with git config --global help.format <web|man|info>. Unfortunately the man pages are not part of the Git for Windows bundle so only 'web' works.
Related
The git log subcommand has the option --show-signature to display pgp signatures of the commits (if present).
This can also be enabled by default via git config log.showSignature true.
I have set this config option to true.
The problem is that I am now looking for an option to pass to git log to not show the signature in the log (while the config is still set to true),
something like
git config --no-show-signature.
I was unable to find anything helpful in the git documentation.
For context: Most of the time, I do want git log to be active, but in some automated scripts, I really don't need this, because it messes up some automatic parsing etc.
I'll repeat #phd's comment, which in the current state of things seems like the most straightforward way to cancel that config parameter (and only that one) :
Try git -c log.showSignature=false log
Another option is to use git log's sister command : git rev-list.
The differences are :
git rev-list isn't affected by log.* config parameters
you need to add --no-commit-header to avoid one extra line on each commit (see this answer here which links to doc)
you need to specify explicitly the refs/branches names (e.g: git rev-list will error, you need to say git rev-list HEAD)
Other than that, it understands the same options as git log :
git rev-list --no-commit-header --graph --format="%h (%an %ad) %s" HEAD
I want to merge a remote repository to a new repository on GitHub. I have tried the following bash commands:
git init
git commit --allow-empty -m "Initial dummy commit"
git remote add --fetch old_a <OldA repo URL>
git merge old_a/master --allow-unrelated-histories
After executing the last command, this screen pops up:
Here bash is asking me to enter a commit message. But typing appears to be prohibited everywhere except in the yellow line. Not only that, I can't even terminate this prompt if I want to go back to the command line. There seems no way to break out other than closing bash itself. So how do I proceed from here?
PS: I have already tried to change my default git editor to vim using the following commands:
git config --global core.editor vim
As well as,
export EDITOR="vim"
But both of these commands didn't work.
This is not an issue, all you need to do is
Press Insert Key and then Enter Key. This will allow you to type a message
Once you have done that Press Esace (Esc) then :wq to exit
I tend to stash changes without remembering why I stash them.
I do make it a point to git stash push -m most of the time, but if there's a fire drill or something else that knocks me out of flow, I may forget and lose time trying to recover.
Is there a way to imitate the behavior of git commit (minus the -m) for git stash where vim pops up and abandons the operation if the message is empty?
AFAIK there's no config option for this. You'll have to write an alias in your .gitconfig and train yourself to use it.
For example, I have two stash aliases git pop and git save. (You can see I didn't get the memo about git stash save being deprecated). These are both for convenience, and to change the default behavior to something I find more useful.
save = stash save -k -u
pop = stash pop
Unfortunately git stash push -m doesn't bring up an editor, if you need to write more than a few words to describe what you were doing consider a branch instead. We can fix this by writing a little shell function and passing the argument to -m using "$#" to ensure messages with spaces are a single argument.
savem = "!f() { git save -m \"$#\"; }; f"
Now you can write git savem 'remember to remember what this was'.
$ git savem 'remember to remember what this was'
Saved working directory and index state On issue/45: remember to remember what this was
And if you forget, you'll get the normal git-stash usage message. You can snazz up the alias to provide a custom usage message if you like.
$ git savem
usage: git stash list [<options>]
or: git stash show [<stash>]
...
To me it makes sense to consider using a branch for this. It seems like you want to keep the changes. Branches can be named so it’s easier to recall what was being worked on. These can be local or pushed to remote in case it wasn’t a drill.
$ git branch topic/wip
If you want continue work on master yo can do a
$ git checkout master
Not pretty but could be achieved using bash + vipe in moreutils
msg="$(< /dev/null vipe)";
[[ -z "$msg" ]] || git stash -m "$msg"
The git help command on Windows (msysgit distribution) spawns web browser each time I run it. I tried git help -m which reports "No manual entry for ..." and git help -i which says "info: Terminal type 'msys' is not smart enough to run Info." The same happens in bash under Cygwin.
Is there any sensible way to get light-weight help in cmd terminal?
It works for particular commands: git <command> -h
Edit, thanks to #the-happy-hippo
But it shows only a brief description, not the full one, as git help <command> or git <command> --help gives on Windows.
git <verb> -h shows a command usage in the same terminal window.
On the other hand, git <verb> --help and git help <verb> open a browser.
Update for Git 2.x (June 2017, Git 2.13.1)
You still don't have man:
> git -c help.format=man help add
warning: failed to exec 'man': No such file or directory
fatal: no man viewer handled the request
Same for git <verb> --help.
git <verb> -h does not print the man page, only the short usage section (nothing to do with man)
With Git 2.34 (Q4 2021), when git cmd -h shows more than one line of usage text (e.g. the cmd subcommand may take sub-sub-command), parse-options API learned to align these lines, even across i18n/l10n.
See commit 4631cfc (21 Sep 2021), and commit 84122ec, commit 78a5091, commit 5d70198 (13 Sep 2021) by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason (avar).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit d7bc852, 13 Oct 2021)
parse-options: properly align continued usage output
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
Some commands such as "git stash"(man) emit continued options output with e.g. git stash -h, because usage_with_options_internal() prefixes with its own whitespace the resulting output wasn't properly aligned.
Let's account for the added whitespace, which properly aligns the output.
The "git stash" command has usage output with a N_() translation that legitimately stretches across multiple lines;
N_("git stash [push [-p|--patch] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-q|--quiet]\n"
" [-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [-m|--message <message>]\n"
[...]
We'd like to have that output aligned with the length of the initial "git stash" output, but since usage_with_options_internal() adds its own whitespace prefixing we fell short, before this change we'd emit:
$ git stash -h
usage: git stash list [<options>]
or: git stash show [<options>] [<stash>]
[...]
or: git stash [push [-p|--patch] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-q|--quiet]
[-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [-m|--message <message>]
[...]
Now we'll properly emit aligned output.
I.e.
the last four lines above will instead be (a whitespace-only change to the above):
[...]
or: git stash [push [-p|--patch] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-q|--quiet]
[-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [-m|--message <message>]
[...]
This change is relatively more complex since I've accounted for making it future-proof for RTL translation support.
Later in usage_with_options_internal() we have some existing padding code dating back to d7a38c5 ("parse-options: be able to generate usages automatically", 2007-10-15, Git v1.5.4-rc0 -- merge) which isn't RTL-safe, but that code would be easy to fix.
Let's not introduce new RTL translation problems here.
Original answer (2014)
No, even though an alternative, based on a 'cat' of the htlp txt files, is suggested in "how do I get git to show command-line help in windows?".
There man.<tool>.cmd config introduced in 2008, allows to set a custom command, but msys shell isn't shipped with man.exe.
World's most overengineered workaround for this problem: use WSL
(that is, unless you already are a WSL user, in which case it's merely an ordinary workaround)
Install one of the linux distros via Windows Store
Go in and ensure it has the git package installed
From the Windows command line, bash -c 'git help fetch' etc.
Here's an alias for that last one:
[alias]
hep = "!f() { $SYSTEMROOT/System32/bash -c \"git help $1\"; }; f"
(And no you can't override git built-ins, but you can make a shell command to intercept and reroute help.)
I want to use Xcode 4's "Version Editor" view as my standard difftool for Git.
In other words, I want to be able to set this option:
git config --global diff.external <XCODE>
And have the diff open in Xcode's diff viewer (because it's cool).
Is this possible? How?
Sadly not possible. Here's hoping Apple changes that someday though.
I'm guessing you already know the following, but for the benefit of others who may not, you can use Apple's FileMerge application instead for a similar, albeit somewhat lesser, experience with a command like:
git difftool path/to/file
My git defaults to using FileMerge as the difftool, but you can configure it explicitly with:
git config --global diff.tool opendiff
(This stops git from listing the candidate tools every time too.) I also like to disable git's difftool pre-launch prompting:
git config --global difftool.prompt false
It is possible to configure git so that git diff will invoke FileMerge as well, or instead. (I prefer to just leave git diff the way it is myself.) If you want that you first need to create a shell script to map the appropriate arguments to opendiff:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/opendiff "$2" "$5" -merge "$1"
and then run
git config --global diff.external /path/to/shell/script