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

You might be confusing git the tool with git repos. msysgit and cygwin git provide the tools, the repositories can exist independently of having git binaries around.

1 - Yes. msysgit is an implementation of git that uses MSYS, and has higher performance than Cygwin git. msysgit has command line git.exe executables as well. msysgit will not depend on other things, and you can run it from regular cmd.

Cygwin's git will have dependencies on the Cygwin system, and is slow compared to msysgit.

You can, however, have both installed, but if you don't use cygwin for anything else, it's not necessary to install it just for git. I strongly favor msysgit here.

2 - git is git, you can use msysgit or cygwin's git for the same repositories, though be careful of version mismatches (like if you're using msysgit 1.7.8 and cygwin git 1.6). I don't think it's a big problem but I've never had multiple git versions installed.

edit:

3 - msysgit portable means you can carry msysgit around on something like a flash drive.

Extra:

You might want to give TortoiseGit a try. It's a GUI for git, and gives you context menus for doing git stuff in the Windows Explorer. You do need to have msysgit installed before installing TortoiseGit.