I guess I don’t really have to tell the world about this, since if you type the title of this blog post in Google it will come back as the top hit. But it’s still worth mentioning msysgit, a pretty darn good git client on Windows. It’s small, it’s efficient, and it’s git. :-) You could of course use git in cygwin, but git in cygwin feels a little “heavy” and by no means small, since you have to get the whole cygwin environment to even use git. So, if you don’t already have cygwin, and want to use git on Windows, msysgit is a pretty good choice. It comes with a minimal bash shell, and while I’m happy to see ssh included with its shell, I was a little disappointed that they left out rsync. But that’s just one minor downside.

For me, msysgit is my git client of choice on Windows, especially in a virtual machine setting where the disk space is tight. On a build machine, though, I still use git in cygwin since I already have to use cygwin to build OOo.