GitForWindows vs. Cygwin

[Frank Fesevur]

2018-03-20 23:52 GMT+01:00 KARL BOTTS:
> Can anyone enlighten me about the relationship of "Git for Windows" to
> Cygwin?

Depends on how you define "relationship". Tony summed it up very nicely.

> I have no intention to use GFW myself: I use Cygwin git.  But now other people
> around here are discovering GitHub, MSysGit and or GitForWindows.  Pretty
> soon, we are going to wind up with multiple git flavors installed on the same
> host, which worries me.

I use the Cygwin based git tools (tig most of the time) as my main
client, but also use Git for Windows and its tig, WSL based and real
Ubuntu, the builtin git client in Visual Studio and VSCode. I often
combine them in one project, for instance use VS for the simple and
easy commit, use the Cygwin command line for more advance stuff and to
push and pull (because I mainly use SSH).

The **real caveat** is to get your line endings right. You need that
figured out in any multi platform environment, and combining Windows
bases git and Cygwin based git is exactly that. Cygwin and Ubuntu
default to LF. Git for Windows and the VS clients default to CRLF.

We use "git config --global core.autocrlf false" and combine that with
a proper .gitattributes and .editorconfig file. So far that works
quite well for us.

Hope it helps,
Frank

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