Use Cygwin or msysGit version of Git, or both?

Question

I am running Windows 7, I just installed Cygwin for the first time today so I have been playing around with it. I am now wanting to start using Git as well.

From wha

Answer 1

1) If you are not using cygwin for anything else, and you want to use Git, go with msysgit. It brings in good Git integration to Windows and almost all GUI tools - Git Extensions, TortoiseGit and others that I know of, are dependent on msysgit. Also with msysgit, you can use git from cmd, powershell etc. which is not possible if you only have cygwin git.

msysgit comes with it's own bash and you can use that for command line and you won't need cygwin ( again, from point of you not using cygwin for other things). Almost all git features are available in msysgit and except for some Windows specific changes ( and performance), you will find that everything works in a comparable way to git on *nix. cygwin will not be as performant as msysgit and much less native git on *nix.

2) And it is possible to have them both and you don't need separate repos. They can co-exist peacefully.

3) Git repos are lightweight as they only involve filesystem. There is no concept of portable git repos, as they are effectively portable. Msysgit portable is meant to allow you to operate on Git repos on a system without installing msysgit.