Tips and Tricks

Open Repository in SourceTree from Cygwin

SourceTree is my go-to Windows git client. It has pretty good UI and exposes most of the more advanced features that I need (git add -p being chief among them).

But I still spend a lot of time in the command line via Cygwin and want the ability to open SourceTree to whatever repo I happen to be in at the time.

I don’t like the manual process of loading up SourceTree and adding a new repository bookmark. A lot of times, I don’t even care to book mark the repo: I just want to pull it up and look at some diffs or quickly add parts of a file.

Luckily, SourceTree added a few command line arguments a few versions back that allow you to open it right to a repository.

It’s a little clunky in cygwin, like most things, but with a small script it becomes very accessible.

~/bin/stree
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#!/bin/bash
# Open SourceTree to the file status window for the repo
# in the provided directory.
#
# stree [path]
#
# if no path is provided, the current working directory is used

# Cygwin path to the source tree executable
SOURCE_TREE="/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Atlassian/SourceTree/SourceTree.exe"

# Determine the path. If a path is provided, convert it to
# (w)indows (a)bsolute path with cygpath. Otherwise, convert
# the current directory
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
  cwd=$(cygpath -wa $1)
else
  cwd=$(cygpath -wa $PWD)
fi

# Override the HOME environment variable to be the windows
# HOME instead of cygwin's $HOME. Then execute source tree
# See https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2014/01/29/sourcetree-for-windows-1-4-released/
# for options
HOME="$HOMEPATH" cygstart -v "$SOURCE_TREE" -f $cwd status

There’s a couple of tricks involved

  1. Use cygpath -wa to convert the Unix file paths for the directory to the absolute windows path. So ~/repos/test/ will become C:\cygwin64\home\<username>\repos\test\.
  2. Override the $HOME environment variable. Cygwin will be default pass the full windows path to ~ as the new HOME environment variable to Source Tree. This caused problems for me when SourceTree in turn shelled out to git and git complained about the .gitconfig. I fixed it by making sure SourceTree used C:\users\<username> as its $HOME instead of C:\cygwin64\home\<username>.