how do i get git to show command-line help in windows?

Question

How do i get git to show command-line help in windows?

I'm using msysgit 1.7.4.

It's defaulting to open the html help in the browser.

I just want to show the text help on the console.

I've seen the config help.format (which is set to html by default). I tried setting this to man or info, but it just says that:

fatal: no info viewer handled the request 

Thanks, matt

Answer 1

Use git <command> -h instead of --help or help. It works in all recent versions of Git for Windows, but gives only the short usage, not the full description.

Answer 2

Issue 187 issue 696 does report:

The main problem is that we do ship neither man.exe nor the man pages.
Otherwise, you could set help.format to 'man' in /etc/gitconfig.

So right now, this isn't possible...

As jamiebarrow adds in the comments:

You could also try installing man yourself

MinGW-get install msys-man.  

man is also available as a windows binary: (found via the mingw FAQ). That page also has groff.

---

As mentioned in "Getting Started - Getting Help", those three commands invokes the man page, but only in its HTML version:

$ git help <verb> $ git <verb> --help $ man git-<verb> 

git <verb> -h does not print the man page, only the short usage section (nothing to do with man)