cygwin+sshd+msysGit=happy
At work, I have use a MacBook Air and run Windows 7 in a VirtualBox VM. I use (and love) the Mac Terminal heavily and have almost an entire monitor dedicated to it. Since we use Git, I wanted to be able to use the Mac Terminal to interact with files on my Windows 7 VM since I do a good deal of development on the Windows box itself. I installed cygwin with the sshd and Git packages, configured it and was able to successfully ssh in to the Windows box from my Mac OSX terminal. (By the way, the reason I went with cygwin is because I was able to install sshd as a Windows Service; msysGit does not provide sshd). After some tinkering with settings and ssh keys, everything was working fairly well. However, over time I began to notice (more and more) Git on cygwin running slow when doing pull, merge, status, etc. on a particularly large repo. It got really frustrating! I tried the same commands in msysGit and things were much snappier, possibly because msysGit was running Git 1.9.4 and the latest version (available) of Git in cygwin was 1.7.x. Anyway, I decided I would try to run msysGit from within cygwin to see if could get the best of both worlds. It wasn’t the easiest thing to get working but I finally did get them playing nicely with each other and am very happy. Here are the steps I took:
- Install cygwin with the latest Git package. (My install path is C:\cygwin64)
- Install the latest version of msysGit. (My install path is C:\Program Files (x86)\Git)
- Rename C:\cygwin64\bin\git.exe to C:\cygwin64\bin\git_cygwin64.exe (to back it up)
- Copy C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\git.exe to C:\cygwin64\bin\
- Copy the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\libexec to C:\cygwin64\
- From within cygwin environment, run git config –global color.ui always
The only issue I’m still having is when doing a git log command, the paging is not working. If I run git log | less the paging works fine so I am just using this syntax for now.