git help [-a|--all|-i|--info|-m|--man|-w|--web] [COMMAND]
With no options and no COMMAND given, the synopsis of the git command and a list of the most commonly used git commands are printed on the standard output.
If the option --all or -a is given, then all available commands are printed on the standard output.
If a git command is named, a manual page for that command is brought up. The man program is used by default for this purpose, but this can be overridden by other options or configuration variables.
Note that git --help ... is identical to git help ... because the former is internally converted into the latter.
-a, --all
-i, --info
-m, --man
By default the man program will be used to display the manual page, but the man.viewer configuration variable may be used to choose other display programs (see below).
-w, --web
The web browser can be specified using the configuration variable help.browser, or web.browser if the former is not set. If none of these config variables is set, the git-web---browse helper script (called by git-help) will pick a suitable default. See git-web---browse(1) for more information about this.
If no command line option is passed, the help.format configuration variable will be checked. The following values are supported for this variable; they make git-help behave as their corresponding command line option:
The help.browser, web.browser and browser.<tool>.path will also be checked if the web format is chosen (either by command line option or configuration variable). See -w|--web in the OPTIONS section above and git-web---browse(1).
The man.viewer config variable will be checked if the man format is chosen. The following values are currently supported:
Values for other tools can be used if there is a corresponding man.<tool>.cmd configuration entry (see below).
Multiple values may be given to the man.viewer configuration variable. Their corresponding programs will be tried in the order listed 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 if DISPLAY is not set) and in that case emacs' woman mode will be tried.
If everything fails, or if no viewer is configured, the viewer specified in the GIT_MAN_VIEWER environment variable will be tried. If that fails too, the man program will be tried anyway.
You can explicitly provide a full path to your preferred man viewer by setting the configuration variable man.<tool>.path. For example, you can configure the absolute path to konqueror by setting man.konqueror.path. Otherwise, git-help assumes the tool is available in PATH.
When the man viewer, specified by the man.viewer configuration variables, is not among the supported ones, then the corresponding man.<tool>.cmd configuration variable will be looked up. If this variable exists then the specified tool will be treated as a custom command and a shell eval will be used to run the command with the man page passed as arguments.
When konqueror is specified in the man.viewer configuration variable, we launch kfmclient to try to open the man page on an already opened konqueror in a new tab if possible.
For consistency, we also try such a trick if man.konqueror.path is set to something like A_PATH_TO/konqueror. That means we will try to launch A_PATH_TO/kfmclient instead.
If you really want to use konqueror, then you can use something like the following:
[man]
viewer = konq
[man "konq"]
cmd = A_PATH_TO/konqueror
Note that all these configuration variables should probably be set using 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.
Written by Junio C Hamano <m[blue]gitster@pobox.comm[][1]> and the git-list <m[blue]git@vger.kernel.orgm[][2]>.
Initial documentation was part of the git(1) man page. Christian Couder <m[blue]chriscool@tuxfamily.orgm[][3]> extracted and rewrote it a little. Maintenance is done by the git-list <m[blue]git@vger.kernel.orgm[][2]>.
Part of the git(1) suite