GitHub - nukata/cyg-git: Use Cygwin's Git from Go and VSCode

2 min read Original article ↗

Cyg-Git

This provides a Git for Windows virtually. You only need Cygwin and its packages.

I had once tried the Go plugin for VSCode on Windows 10 and found that it required Git for Windows implicitly. However, it was redundant since I had already installed Cygwin and its git package. So I wrote this proxy and wrapper.

Experimental compatibiliy with VSCode

At first I had implemented the proxy for git as a batch file git.bat. It had worked successfully with go and its plugin for VSCode. However, VSCode itself did not seem to recognize any batch file as git. Now I tried to make VSCode also recognize the proxy by implementing it with C. It is just an experiment currently but it seems to work fairly well.

How to install

  • You need the following Cygwin packages: git, bash, zsh and mingw64-x86_64-gcc-core.

  • If you have installed Cygwin somewhere other than C:/cygwin64, modify the path name C:/cygwin64/bin/bash in git.c of Cyg-Git accordingly.

  • compile the git.c with x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc -o git. Make sure the resulting git.exe is independent from cygwin1.dll.

$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc -o git git.c
$ ls -l git.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 suzuki None 400412 Dec 30 18:44 git.exe
$ ldd ./git.exe
        ntdll.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll (0x7ffcacc40000)
        KERNEL32.DLL => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNEL32.DLL (0x7ffcac2f0000)
        KERNELBASE.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNELBASE.dll (0x7ffca8e10000)
        msvcrt.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/msvcrt.dll (0x7ffcabc00000)
$
  • Put the resulting git.exe and git-wrapper of Cyg-Git anywhere on the Windows' path. I put them in C:\Users\<my name>\go\bin. Make sure they have been "chmod u+x"-ed.

Now you can use git on Windows.

C:\>git --version
git version 2.17.0

C:\>

Appendix: Proxy for GCC

Go's cgo on Windows needs mingw-w64 gcc as gcc. Put the following gcc.bat in C:\Users\<your name>\go\bin.

@echo off
PATH C:\cygwin64\bin;%PATH%
C:\cygwin64\bin\x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc %*

Then go build will use C:\cygwin64\bin\x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc as gcc. I have successfully built fyne_demo in fyne-io/fyne with it.

C:\Users\suzuki\go\src\fyne.io\fyne\cmd\fyne_demo>go build -ldflags -H=windowsgui

C:\Users\suzuki\go\src\fyne.io\fyne\cmd\fyne_demo>fyne_demo.exe