Watch GitHub tutorial 05: Compare Git Bash, Command Prompt, and PowerShell Video Tutorial

To run Git commands in Windows, there are various options, including Git Bash, Command Prompt, Powershell, and maybe more. In this section, I will compare three options based on my experience. In the end, I will choose the one that I feel comfortable, with more features in Windows, with some challenges, and use it in the following tutorials. The first choice is Git Bash. It comes with Git installation. You can find it in Git folder through Start menu. You need to use Linux commands to navigate around, like "ls" for listing content, "cd" for changing directory. Here is a quick demo. When changing directory using backslash as in Windows system for separating folders, don't forget to surround the path with single or double quotes. Now send Git command "Status". You can use Tab for code completion like intelli-sense. Everything should work as expected. Don't worry about the meaning of the Git commands for now. We will cover them in the following tutorials. The second choice is Command Prompt. You already saw its action in the previous tutorial that Git commands can run directly there. Here is a demo how Git commands work in Command Prompt. Query status ... clear screen ... add changes to staging area ... commit changes to local repository with comments .... The Git commands works as expected. If you don't want to learn Linux commands, Command Prompt is a workable option. But don't decide yet. Let's look at one more option before jump to conclusion. The third option is PowerShell. It's a recommended terminal in Windows. It's object-oriented, powerful, and full of .NET features. There is a dedicated PowerShell module called "posh-git". This module not only provides Git status summary information that can be displayed in the PowerShell prompt, but also provides tab completion support for common git commands, branch names, paths and more. But there is one caveat when using PowerShell for Git. It took me several days to figure out what was wrong. But first, let me show you the problems I met when ran Git commands in PowerShell. The minor problem was the warning messages when clone a repository. Although the clone process was successful, the "RemoteException" and "NativeCommandError" made me puzzled for quite a while. It is suggested that this issue is caused by the fact that some git commands send output to stderr that should be sent to stdout instead. The major problem is more serious. When I tried to commit without using -m to add a comment, or tried to change the commit comments with "--amend" switch, the whole process got stuck with this message "Vim: warning : output is not to a terminal". The program couldn't get out with the normal Vim exit method, like Escape for command mode, punctuation mark colon with "q" to quit. Here is a short video to demo this problem. The usual command to query status ... clear screen ... add the change in working directory to staging area ... so far so good ... then commit without putting a comment on purpose ... the program gets stuck here, cannot exit Vim editing mode... After several days pondering what really happened, finally I realized that I was using PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment). After switched to non-ISE PowerShell, everything works as expected. Cheers! One loss is that outside ISE, we don't have the drop-down list for suggested commands by intellisense with the key combination Ctrl + Space. But we still have the feature of Tab completion. Here is a demo of Git in Posh-Git. Notice the nice Git status summary information that is displayed in the PowerShell prompt. Query status ... add change to staging area ... clear screen ... query status again ... commit change and edit comment in Vim editor ... save comment and quit Vim with :wq (colon, write, quit) ... query status ... inspect log In conclusion, you can use any one of these options: Git Bash, Command Prompt, and PowerShell. For me, I will choose PowerShell with module "posh-git" in the following tutorials for the benefits of Tab completion, Git status summary information, along with PowerShell object-oriented .NET features. No matter which one you select, the Git commands are the same, the results are also the same. In the next session, we will set up PowerShell for working with GitHub. Thanks for watching!