Git on Windows with Console and PowerShell

Windows people like to do everything on their computers using GUI tools and WYSIWYG editors. And nothing is wrong with that. Personally, I like this approach – it conserves time while giving fast access to the most used options of a given tool (at least usually). Consider the SVN version control system. Initially, it was a console-based tool, but thanks to the great TortoiseSVN project, people may now forget about the command line. However, working with Git is different. Git was designed to be used from the command line, and using it in that way is a pure pleasure! Git commands are well crafted and easy to remember. If you are holding out on Git because it doesn’t give you the right GUI tools, you are holding out for a wrong reason.

Git comes with a bash like prompt which is very powerful. However, there is one problem. The bash prompt is launched within the standard Windows command line, and as probably anyone knows, the command prompt on Windows is one, big misery. So in this post I’m going to address this issue by showing how to set up a convenient command line environment for Git on Windows.

Installing Git

Git can easily be installed on Windows. Head over to http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/ and download Git-1.7.0.2-preview20100309.exe which is the latest version of Git as of this writing. When the installer asks about [Adjusting the PATH environment], select [Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt] as shown on the following screen.

Selecting this option allows to use Git from different shells, like PowerShell. Now that Git is installed, we can open a command line and verify it’s there.

We can also right click any folder in the Windows Explorer and select Git Bash Here – this will launch Git’s default bash shell.

Installing Console

Now it’s time to get rid of the ugly prompts shown above. Head over to the http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ and download the latest version of the Console project. Launch it, and go to Edit->Settings, select Console from the tree on the left and pick up a new shell – the PoweShell. Under Windows 7/2008, it is located at %Windows_Dir%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe. On previous versions of Windows, I believe it must be downloaded separately. Click OK and close the Console. Now launch it again, but this time with Administrator privileges, and issue the following command: [Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted]. This command will allow running custom PowerShell scripts, which is needed for Git integration. Now you have a working PowerShell within nice, tabbed environment. We’re almost there!

Installing PoshGit

It’s time to enable PowerShell-Git integration. To do that, download Posh-Git latest sources available at http://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git and unpack them to %Sys_Drive%:\Users\%Login%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell. Change profile.example.ps1 to profile.ps1. Hurray! You have enabled Git integration! What does it give? When you are inside Git repository, the command prompt changes to show on which branch you are, and whether there are any modifications, and if there are any untracked files (via exclamation mark). To enable output coloring, issue the [git config –global color.ui auto] command.

Enjoy your cool, command line interface for Git!

Sharp3D – The Beginning

Back when I was on holidays, I’ve read a post by Maciej Aniserowicz about the “Daj się poznać” contest. The aim of the contest is to write an open source project of any kind in any technology, and blog about it at least twice a week, for ten weeks period. There’s also pretty nice collection of software to win. And because a crazy idea is floating in my head for a while, I thought – why don’t give it a try?

So what am I going to create? I’m going to build a research application for manipulating 3D objects, perhaps with the ability to define materials for them, modify existing objects, add new objects to the scene, and render them using custom crafted raytracing algorithm. As if this were not enough, application will fully support multi-touch displays.

Currently, I have a basic skeleton of the application, with my own scene objects (I want to abstract from WPF elements). Here’s the screenshot from the initial drop.

Motivation

There are a couple of reasons I’m writing this project. By no means, the most important thing for me is to learn strong basics of 3D programming. Triangles, tessellation, normals, materials, lightning, raytracing and more – there is a whole bunch of 3D stuff to master. I also want to learn this in context of WPF 3D – hope this will help me in building better looking apps in the future. I also want to see if the WPF 3D is suitable for project which does more than displaying 3D cubes with buttons on the sides. And last but not least – 3D programming is fun!

Goals

I want Sharp3D to be an extensible foundation for writing 3D applications by others. Thus, the main goal is the extensibility and component design. The application will span several components which can be used in standalone manner – this will support others in developing their own 3D applications! I want to provide many ways of interacting with the 3D model. So besides the standard mouse and keyboard, I will utilize multi-touch capabilities of today’s monitors, and the Wiimote. Because editing capabilities, if any, will be very limited, an important part is to write a loader which will take existing scene and import it to the program. I plan to implement 3ds file importer, because this is de facto the standard in the 3D industry – all known modeling applications support it. Having that, another cool feature will be XAML exporter.

Tools

Because this is a research project, I’m going to use the latest and greatest tools available J This includes:

· .NET Framework 4.0

· Visual Studio 2010

· WPF 4.0

· Blend 4.0

· Git

· Multi-touch / Wiimote

Sources

I decided to use Git which is a fast, distributed version control system. The distributed means that the code repository lives not only on the server (which by the way is not a requirement) but on the user’s computer. This allows committing changes locally, and then pushing them back to the server. When using Git, the natural choice for open source repository is GitHub. The Sharp3D sources can be found at http://github.com/pwlodek/Sharp3D.

There are two important branches. The most important is the master branch. It will contain, latest, stable version. The development will be done on the dev branch. Besides, I will try to use the branch-per-feature approach, which I presume is self-explanatory. After I decide a feature is complete, it will be merged into dev branch, and then into master.

Contribution

If you are interested in contributing to the project – you are more than welcome! Just drop me an email so we can discuss the details. To begin your contribution, register on GitHub and fork the main repo and work on your part. Once ready, issue a pull request – and I will do the rest ;) The one thing is that I won’t pull till the end of the contest as the participants are supposed to work on their own.