Background

In the second post in this series, we see that the space in the path of Git Bash can become a source of trouble.

Problem

How to run external commands in GVim Portable invoked by Git Bash?

A failed attempt

I googled “vim shell path program files”, and clicked the first web site as usual. Even though I don’t, and won’t have Cygwin installed in my computer, I still viewed this page, which suggested that the path of shell option should be surrounded by a pair of double quotes "". I tried this, but the above problem wasn’t solved.

Solution

I recalled that after opening the built-in editor in Command Prompt on M$ Win* Professional/Enterprise, the displayed path of the working directory would be different: some tildes appear in the path.

Therefore, I googled “windows path without spaces”, and learnt to use DIR /X in Command Prompt to solve this problem from an answer to this Super User question. Finally, usual external commands like ls and file can be executed inside GVim Portable. This solves the error mentioned in the “Discussion” section of the second post in this series. What I’ve wriiten in the “Solution” section can be updated: I expect that under usual circumstances, the external commands can be run even if the shell option is set to Git Bash.

Remarks

I used an if statement to surround the set shell=/path/to/bash.exe because the same Stack Overflow answer mentioned in the “A failed attempt” section said that many Vim plugins used has("win32"). If a plugin failed in a GVim window triggered by Git Bash, I can still use it by opening GVim with Command Prompt.

Now, though using curl in GVim whose shell is configured to cmd.exe, I can finally use curl in GVim invoked by Git Bash.