Cannot launch git gui using cygwin on windows

Question

I used to launch git gui within my cygwin console without any problems but since I updated cygwin I\'ve got the following error message:

$ git gui
Applicatio         


        

Answer 1

After spending more time than I'd care to admit, I managed to find a working solution to execute gitk from my cygwin shell. I couldn't get any of the instructions with starting the X server to work reliably, and in the end, the solution was pretty simple.

The largest caveat is needing to have Git for Windows installed, the download for that can be found here.

Now for the whole running gitk part. Git for windows includes a cmd folder, that has a gitk.cmd windows command file. That's all you need to call to have gitk open.

$ [path-to-git]/cmd/gitk.cmd

On my system the Git path is in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Git" so the command would look like this:

$ "/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Git/cmd/gitk.cmd"

In my ~/.bash_profile I've added a function to handle that call which looks like this:

gitk() {
  "/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Git/cmd/gitk.cmd"
}

Hope this helps someone else trying to figure this piece out.