NAME

git-help - Display help information about Git

SYNOPSIS

git help [-a|--all [--[no-]verbose]] [-g|--guide]
       [-i|--info|-m|--man|-w|--web] [COMMAND|GUIDE]

DESCRIPTION

With no options and no COMMAND or GUIDE given, the synopsis of the _git_command and a list of the most commonly used Git commands are printedon the standard output.

If the option —all or -a is given, all available commands areprinted on the standard output.

If the option —guide or -g is given, a list of the usefulGit guides is also printed on the standard output.

If a command, or a guide, is given, a manual page for that command orguide is brought up. The man program is used by default for thispurpose, but this can be overridden by other options or configurationvariables.

If an alias is given, git shows the definition of the alias onstandard output. To get the manual page for the aliased command, usegit COMMAND —help.

Note that git —help … is identical to git help … because theformer is internally converted into the latter.

To display the git[1] man page, use git help git.

This page can be displayed with git help help or git help —help

OPTIONS

• -a
• —all

• Prints all the available commands on the standard output. Thisoption overrides any given command or guide name.

• —verbose

• When used with —all print description for all recognizedcommands. This is the default.

• -c

• —config

• List all available configuration variables. This is a shortsummary of the list in git-config[1].

• -g

• —guides

• Prints a list of useful guides on the standard output. Thisoption overrides any given command or guide name.

• -i

• —info

• Display manual page for the command in the info format. Theinfo program will be used for that purpose.

• -m

• —man
• Display manual page for the command in the man format. Thisoption may be used to override a value set in thehelp.format configuration variable.

By default the man program will be used to display the manual page,but the man.viewer configuration variable may be used to chooseother display programs (see below).

• -w
• —web
• Display manual page for the command in the web (HTML)format. A web browser will be used for that purpose.

The web browser can be specified using the configuration variablehelp.browser, or web.browser if the former is not set. If none ofthese config variables is set, the git web{litdd}browse helper script(called by git help) will pick a suitable default. Seegit-web{litdd}browse[1] for more information about this.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

help.format

If no command-line option is passed, the help.format configurationvariable will be checked. The following values are supported for thisvariable; they make git help behave as their corresponding command-line option:

• "man" corresponds to -m|—man,

• "info" corresponds to -i|—info,

• "web" or "html" correspond to -w|—web.

help.browser, web.browser and browser.<tool>.path

The help.browser, web.browser and browser.<tool>.path will alsobe checked if the web format is chosen (either by command-lineoption or configuration variable). See -w|—web in the OPTIONSsection above and git-web{litdd}browse[1].

man.viewer

The man.viewer configuration variable will be checked if the _man_format is chosen. The following values are currently supported:

• "man": use the man program as usual,

• "woman": use emacsclient to launch the "woman" mode in emacs(this only works starting with emacsclient versions 22),

• "konqueror": use kfmclient to open the man page in a new konquerortab (see Note about konqueror below).

Values for other tools can be used if there is a correspondingman.<tool>.cmd configuration entry (see below).

Multiple values may be given to the man.viewer configurationvariable. Their corresponding programs will be tried in the orderlisted in the configuration file.

For example, this configuration:

    [man]
        viewer = konqueror
        viewer = woman

will try to use konqueror first. But this may fail (for example, ifDISPLAY is not set) and in that case emacs' woman mode will be tried.

If everything fails, or if no viewer is configured, the viewer specifiedin the GITMAN_VIEWER environment variable will be tried. If thatfails too, the _man program will be tried anyway.

man.<tool>.path

You can explicitly provide a full path to your preferred man viewer bysetting the configuration variable man.<tool>.path. For example, youcan configure the absolute path to konqueror by settingman.konqueror.path. Otherwise, git help assumes the tool isavailable in PATH.

man.<tool>.cmd

When the man viewer, specified by the man.viewer configurationvariables, is not among the supported ones, then the correspondingman.<tool>.cmd configuration variable will be looked up. If thisvariable exists then the specified tool will be treated as a customcommand and a shell eval will be used to run the command with the manpage passed as arguments.

Note about konqueror

When konqueror is specified in the man.viewer configurationvariable, we launch kfmclient to try to open the man page on analready opened konqueror in a new tab if possible.

For consistency, we also try such a trick if man.konqueror.path isset to something like A_PATH_TO/konqueror. That means we will try tolaunch A_PATH_TO/kfmclient instead.

If you really want to use konqueror, then you can use something likethe following:

    [man]
        viewer = konq
 
    [man "konq"]
        cmd = A_PATH_TO/konqueror

Note about git config —global

Note that all these configuration variables should probably be setusing the —global flag, for example like this:

$ git config --global help.format web
$ git config --global web.browser firefox

as they are probably more user specific than repository specific.See git-config[1] for more information about this.

GIT

Part of the git[1] suite