Whenever someone asks me at the end of my git presentation about what tools to use with git my answer was always be the same:

Learn to use the commandline. It’s by far the most convenient way to get stuff done. That’s the way git was intended to be used, and with msysgit and Powershell you get a pretty powerful shell to do your stuff. I work exclusively from the commandline, rarely using gitk to take a look at the history.
Unfortunately the basic Windows commandline (cmd) is just awful and outdated. And while some people swear by the MinGW stuff, I loathe the Unix commandline. So Powershell was the only good way for me on Windows to use git.

Now, thanks to some great work from Keith Dahlby, Jeremy Skinner and Mark Embling using git from Powershell just got a whole lot more comfortable with Posh-Git.

Documentation is still a bit sparse, but Posh-Git at it’s core gives you two things: It modifies your Powershell prompt to display relevant git information (branch name and staged/unstaged changes) and adds tab-completion to all git commands. Tab completion also works on branches so you can even hit tab on a git checkout and it will auto-complete to a branch. Really really nice I have to say.

Here is how my git shell looks like now with Posh-Git:

Once you have changes it will display them also on the prompt:

(Meaning: 1 new file, 1 deleted and 0 old ones changed)

Installing

Unfortunately not everyone is a Powershell buff like Keith and friends, so I had a bit of trouble finding out how to set up Posh-Git. Actually, it’s dead simple, but nobody told me: Just put all files from the Posh-Git repository into the folder:

C:\Users\<username>\WindowsPowerShell\

And rename the file profile.example.ps1 to Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1. If you already had a PowerShell_profile.ps1 file set up with some custom settings, you can just add the code from profile.example.ps1 to your existing profile (assuming you didn’t change your prompt before).

After that, restart your Powershell prompt and enjoy!

Important:

The latest Posh-Git is only working with git 1.7.1 and higher, so if you are still running the 1.7.0.2 release you have to use the v0.2 Posh-Git release.

During my presentation at Barcamp Vienna today I got asked what GUI to use with Git. My plain and simple answer was: “Use the command line, its just better that way.. “. Well, after the talk Andreas approached me and raised a very good point: Mainstream adoption of tools (like Git) often depends on GUIs to help people during the transition phase.

Besides the obvious Guis like TortoiseGit or GitGui there is now one more tool aimed at .NET developers to make the transition easier: Git Source Control Provider for Visual Studio 2010. It looks like Microsoft got VS2010 extensibility right this time, and someone managed to implement Git integration right into the VS2010 solution explorer:

The Plugin is available through Visual Studio Gallery and seems to be Ms-Pl licensed and free, although I couldn’t find the code anywhere, it’s still worth checking out: Git Source Control Provider.

I just booted my PC after 4 hours of drive through heavy rain and thunderstorms back from Vienna where I attended Barcamp. I have to say it was just fantastic! All Barcamps I attended before had a very diverse crowd, but usually lacking developers thus the social media enthusiasts usually dominated the attendees.

Barcamp Vienna was different, maybe it was the awesome location at Microsoft Austria headquarters or just the fact that it was in Vienna.. But I met more coders there in 2 days than in the last 2 yeas in Klagenfurt.

Coolest thing, I even met a Subsonic developer: Saintedlama! That was really awesome and funny when we met during breakfast randomly chatting about our stuff and I noted that I’ll be presenting dotless when he said: “Wow that’s you? I wanted to contact you for some time now about dotless. I’m working on Subsonic btw.. " (Imagine my jaw dropping right there.. ). He showed me some really cool demos of the simple repository they introduced in SubSonic 3 and it’s uses with MVC.. and I have to tell you: wow.. Using a ORM was really never so easy..

Anyway, I really had a great time either chatting up really interesting people or doing my two presentations.
On Saturday I talked about dotless while on Sunday I talked about Git. Both talks went great in my opinion, but if anyone was there and has additional feedback on my presentations I’d be glad to hear them. I uploaded both slide decks to http://www.docs.com and you can find them here:

dotless – CSS done right

Git

At any rate: Thanks to Max and Rolf for organizing this awesome event and to Microsoft for so generously hosting it!

When I started out with git I didn’t start using the commandline right away. I fiddled around with TortoiseGit and GitGui quite a bit before I found out that it’s just so much faster to do all those things from the commandline. As we all know, the windows commandline is not the most powerful thing on the planet, but I also loathe the unix commandline that comes installed with git (gitbash). Obviously, the only alternative is Powershell so I went with that and am very happy with it.

One thing though: I envied Linux users who could extend their bash prompt to display git specific information directly on the shell. Well, after a bit of digging and through some Stackoverflow articles, I managed to find this:

Powershell is quite extensible, and by placing a file called Microsoft.PowerSehll_profile.ps1 in your Documents\WindowsPowerShell folder you can define a function called prompt that allows you to modify your prompt text.

I’ve been using this now for quite some time, so I can’t recall where I found the script before I modified it, but here it is anyway (credit goes to whoever created it in the first place): Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.

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.