how do i get git to show command-line help in windows?

Question

How do i get git to show command-line help in windows?

I'm using msysgit 1.7.4.

It's defaulting to open the html help in the browser.

I just want to show the text help on the console.

I've seen the config help.format (which is set to html by default). I tried setting this to man or info, but it just says that:

fatal: no info viewer handled the request

Thanks, matt

Uriah

Answer 1

Use git <command> -h instead of --help or help. It works in all recent versions of Git for Windows, but gives only the short usage, not the full description.

Disfigure

Answer 2

Issue 187 issue 696 does report:

The main problem is that we do ship neither man.exe nor the man pages.
Otherwise, you could set help.format to 'man' in /etc/gitconfig.

So right now, this isn't possible...

As jamiebarrow adds in the comments:

You could also try installing man yourself

MinGW-get install msys-man. 

man is also available as a windows binary: (found via the mingw FAQ). That page also has groff.

---

As mentioned in "Getting Started - Getting Help", those three commands invokes the man page, but only in its HTML version:

$ git help <verb>
$ git <verb> --help
$ man git-<verb>

git <verb> -h does not print the man page, only the short usage section (nothing to do with man)

Repatriate

Wow, that's really kind of unfortunate. That's the main way I learned to use it! – Monegasque

You could also try installing man yourself, see this SuperUser post: superuser.com/questions/295398/… – Alcohol

The issue 187 link does not work anymore - but there is similar report in the github repo. – Schreck

@Schreck Thank you. I have edited the answer accordingly – Repatriate

Answer 3

I've just spent some time researching the subject, and these are my conclusions:

• msysgit ships with .html and .txt documentation, the latter being well suited for reading on the console; however, no option for directly displaying the txt exists. help.format only supports web/man/info

• there's no way to coax the 'web' format for that purpose - I tried renaming the .txt files to .html and setting my git web.browser to more (together with browser.more.cmd), only to find out that the windows implementation of Git ignores these settings and launches the html file directly (i.e. in the default browser): http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.msysgit/10798

• unless you want to install and use cygwin, there's no easy way to use man or info either - you'll need to download a port of the executable, together with its dependencies (groff, etc), configure it, and download the manpages manually

In the end I resolved for the simplest approach:

githelp.bat: @more "C:\Program Files\Git\doc\git\html\%1.txt"

githelpfind.bat: @dir /b "C:\Program Files\Git\doc\git\html\*.txt" | find "%1"

Usage:

\> githelpfind prune
git-prune-packed.txt
git-prune.txt

\> githelp git-prune
(blah blah blah)

A little more typing this way, but a functional solution.

Syreetasyria

That there is no console output on Windows still kinda sux, but this is better than nothing. – Wohlert

Unfortunately, there are no .txt docs in the recent Git for Windows installations. Only .html. – Disfigure

There's always Lynx. After some experimentation, I went with the latest stable slang version of Lynx - go here and pick Stable release/slang. I needed to add C:\Program Files (x86)\Lynx - web browser to my path and execute git config --global web.browser lynx. This will probably satisfy my needs - if it works for anyone else, I'll re-post this as an answer. – Gerigerianna