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 sh

Answer 1

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.