Git bash (mintty). How to open maximized

Question

I updated git for windows and found that it now has mintty as the command prompt for git bash. It is much better than previous windows command prompt based git bash.

It would be great if I could open the git bash initially maximized. There is a command line argument for mintty to open maximized.

-w, --window normal|min|max|full

But, I don't know how I can pass this argument to mintty when I open git bash from 'Open git bash here' context menu.

Does anyone know how to get this done?

Answer 1

You may put an minttyrc file into etc folder of Git install (like C:\Program Files\Git\etc), with the following config:

Window=max

If you change your mind and want to set a specific window size you can alternatively put the number of columns and rows into minttyrc, for example:

Columns=132
Rows=60

btw, based on https://github.com/mintty/mintty/blob/7d70b3cb9776de288375ffe438d35e648650c98f/wiki/Tips.md, we may have several locations:

For its configuration file, it reads /etc/minttyrc, $APPDATA/mintty/config, ~/.config/mintty/config, ~/.minttyrc, in this order.

Answer 2

This is kind of a hack, but I got it working by replacing git-bash.exe with my own one which gives -w max additional argument.

Here is the code for git-bash.exe.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <stdlib.h>

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    system("START /B D:\\program_files\\git\\Git\\usr\\bin\\mintty.exe -w max -o AppID=GitForWindows.Bash -o RelaunchCommand=\"D:\\program_files\\git\\Git\\git-bash.exe\" -o RelaunchDisplayName=\"Git Bash\" -i /mingw64/share/git/git-for-windows.ico /usr/bin/bash --login -i");
    return 0;
}

You have to change paths in above code to your own values if you need to build your own git-bash.exe from above code.

EDIT: If mintty is started with above code, it does not know the location of git binary. So I had to add the git bin directory to PATH variable.