A while ago now I switched to Windows on my primary development machine. It’s pretty frustrating particularly when it comes to command line support but MozillaBuild goes a long way to giving me a more comfortable environment. One thing that took a long time to get working right though was full colour support from both mercurial and git. Git in particular is a problem because it uses a custom version of MSYS which seems to conflict with the stock MSYS in MozillaBuild leaving things broken if you don’t set it up just right. Since I just switched to a new machine I thought it would be useful to record how I got it working, perhaps more for my benefit than anything else, but perhaps others will find it useful too.

You want to install MozillaBuild, Mercurial and Git. MozillaBuild comes with Mercurial, but it’s generally an older version. This post assumes you put them in their default locations (on a 64-bit machine), so adjust accordingly if you changed that. When the Git installer asks choose the most conservative option, don’t put git in your PATH here.

You need some custom settings. First create a .hgrc file in your home directory or add the following to it if you already have one:

[extensions]
hgext.color=

[color]
mode=win32

Now a .profile file in the same place:

export PATH="/c/Program Files/Mercurial":$PATH:"/c/Program Files (x86)/Git/bin"

The ordering is important there. $PATH will be set up to point to MozillaBuild (and other places) when you run the MozillaBuild startup scripts. You want the installed Mercurial to override the one in MozillaBuild and you want the MozillaBuild binaries to override the custom MSYS versions that Git comes with.

Finally you want a decent console to use. I’m using Console2 with general success. Install it, start it and go into its settings. Console2 supports creating custom tab types, so you can create a new MozillaBuild tab, or a new Windows console tab, etc. I like to do this so go to the “Tabs” section of the settings, click add and then give it a title of MozillaBuild. You then want to add the MozillaBuild startup script you want to use in the “Shell” option, e.g. “C:\mozilla-build\start-msvc10.bat” for me. If you’re feeling extravagant (and have a checkout of mozilla-central), point the icon to browser/branding/official/firefox.ico.

Some final useful settings, In “Hotkeys” assign Ctrl+T to “New Tab 1“. In “Mouse” set “Select Text” to the left button and “Paste Text” to the right button.

And that should be it. Open a new MozillaBuild tab in Console2. If you’ve done everything right you should see messages about the Visual Studio and SDK versions chosen. “which hg” and “which git” should show you the binaries in Program Files somewhere. They should both run and output in colour when useful.