The default installation of git leaves you with a fairly spartan interface. These are some of my tips for making it more pleasant to use. On Windows, this is accessed through git bash, and on Mac, accessed through the terminal.

Obviously, you need git installed. Check to see you have it installed by running git --version, which will produce output like this:

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git version 1.7.9.6 (Apple Git-31.1)

If not, install git first!

The first thing is to set your name and email. These will appear all over the place, so they are good to set up first. It feels a bit weird if you’re the only person using a reposirory, but you only have to set this once. So run

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git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email your.email@domain.com

These are global options and will affect all repositories. These can actually be over-ridden on a per-repository basis, but you don’t generally need to do that. The configuration options go into the file ~/.gitconfig (the ~ means “home” in unix commands).

Editor

The default editor is vi – if you have used this before, this will probably be fine, but if not you are in for a rude shock. So, next, let’s set that to be a better option.

On a Mac

First, check that you have nano installed by typing

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which nano

and then running

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git config --global core.editor '/usr/bin/nano'

(but change the path to reflect where it is installed. In most situations it will be /usr/bin/nano).

Whenever git needs you to write a message on a commit, it will pop open nano. Write the message and quit with Control-X (X for exit), answering “Y” when prompted to save the file.

Adding the --tempfile option will cause nano to save on exit without prompting or asking about the filename. This can be nice to avoid being bothered the whole time.

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git config --global core.editor '/usr/bin/nano --tempfile'

However, it removes the ability to easily abort a commit by not saving the message.

On a Mac, it is possible to use something like “TextEdit” to edit the file, by running

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git config --global core.editor 'open -t -n -W'

There is a catch though; you have to make sure that you quit the application after writing your message. The -n option means that this is new instance of TextEdit so you won’t lose other open work when doing this at least.

On Windows

The simplest solution is to set

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git config --global core.editor notepad

which will use notepad. Notepad makes a bit of a mess of the files when you edit them, but will be good enough to get you going. Longer term, you may find something like using notepad++ more enjoyable, but setting this up is a bit of a hassle.

Colour

By default (on Mac and Linux at least), the command line is fairly stark, but git has options to spruce it up with nice colours. More than just look pretty, these allow you to much more easily scan output.

Just run

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git config --global color.ui true

and the output of status and diff (and a few others) will be coloured for you.