With our GitHub repository ready, and now that my Android development environment has been setup, it was time to install Git so I can actually start working. Git is a Linux tool and all my previous Git experience has only been inside that environment. But luckily Git has been ported to Windows, so I can use Git on my Windows machine without having to run it inside a VM. There are several options for running Git in Windows, and first I chose msysgit, the official Git for Windows project. I then abandoned that in favor of the GitHub application, which promised seamless connection to the GitHub website, including automatic maintenance of SSH keys.
The GitHub app has a nice GUI interface, and seems to be very easy to use. But I honestly haven’t used it much–the app also installs a Git shell, which I vastly prefer to the GUI. The Git shell emulates a Linux terminal, inside a Windows command prompt. Several of Linux commands are emulated inside the shell, such as cp, mv, rm, ls, cd, and others. Tab completion is also implemented which is wonderful. The emulated commands are not as powerful as their real versions (for example, typing “ls” works, but my preferred “ls -lh” doesn’t), but it’s still great to have this option. You can even open text files for editing from within the command prompt– just type notepad instead of nano or gedit. Lastly, a hugely useful addition to this Windows implementation that isn’t even in the Linux original: the prompt in the shell uses symbols to help you keep track of your added, modified, and removed files, and changes color depending on your commit status!
From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.