Ok, today I got this really cool pull request from Jon Galloway for .less. He did some improvements to the T4 Template for .less so that it will run the template on every build if you want that, or that Visual Studio opens up .less.css files. Cool stuff, and thanks a lot Jon! Of course I quickly looked through the changesets and then went ahead and committed it, but I noticed one novice mistake many people run into with MsysGit on Windows.

I am pretty sure Jon only changed a few lines of code, yet the changeset logs every file in the document as changed, thus making it pretty unreadable. This happened to me a lot when I started out with GIT, and finding the solution to this wasn’t easy either. So here is how to fix your MsysGit.

This is caused by a little setting called core.AutoCrlf that is set in MsysGit by default to true. MsysGit will then go ahead and localize the line-ending depending on what machine you are running on. This happens on checkout, so even with abolutely zero changes to the repository you’ll see a lot of local changes where there haven’t been any.

Needless to say how stupid this setting is, it only generates a ton of useless insertions and deletions while sticking to the pipe dream that everyone on the team will use the same tools to generate consistent line feeds (I’ve even had issues with only Windows machines and this setting).

Now the solution to this is rather simple:

By running “git config –global core.autocrlf false” you disable this and the text files will not get changed upon checkout. This now means that Visual Studio will maybe ask you to fix inconsistent line endings when opening a file, but it is still better than having your source control screw you over upon checkout.