I’ve moved away from using a Git GUI to command line, I typically used GitExtensions. The reason being, it’s a little slow having to open any GUI to make a commit and push. It is quicker to use the command line and a side benefit you learn more about how Git works.

Alternate option for connecting to GitHub using OpenSSH on Windows

Setup a remote connection to GitHub on Windows

One thing that blocked me from getting git push and git pull to work is the SSH setup on windows can be fiddly. The simplest way round it is to use Putty choco install putty. Then all that needs to be done is SET an environment variable GIT_SSH with the value of the path to Putty’s plink.exe. Plink is similar to UNIX SSH for establishing a connection to a remote repository.

Set GIT_SSH variable example.

SET GIT_SSH=C:\path\to\PuTTY\plink.exe

Then you need to add the Git user to plink for the authentication to happen. plink.exe [email protected]

Provided you have:

• create your SSH keys to access your GitHub repository
• added these to Pageant.exe which is the authentication agent.

Command line example to add keys to pageant:

C:\path\to\PuTTY\pageant.exe d:\path\to\key-a.ppk d:\path\to\key-b.ppk

To test out if you can connect to github.com, enter: plink.exe -v [email protected].

If you see a successful authentication message, it should now be possible to git push on the command line to your repository.