Background

I often included Unicode characters in my commit messages, such as “Committed in a café”. Since I couldn’t input the character ‘é’ inside the Vim editor shipped with msysgit, and the curl utility didn’t get along well with my GVim Portable I decided to upgrade it.

Then I set up things after the installation of Git for Windows so that it works well with Vundle now.¹ After that, I thought that it would be great if I can set it up on a USB stick so that the Vim editor with the powerful plugins can be executed on every M$ Win* 7 machine.

The first Google search result for “git portable” is the webpage for Git for Windows downloads. To get it installed on a USB device, don’t click “Save file” for the dialog box that popped up upon the page is loaded. Choose the “thumbdrive edition”.

Problem

Each time I opened the Vim editor from Portable Git Bash from the USB, a new .viminfo file was created in the home folder of current user in the C drive. (e.g. C:\Users\Foo\.viminfo) Therefore, it could be deduced that VIM installed (under /usr/share/vim/vim74) in the USB couldn’t load the configurations from .vimrc stored on the same USB. What an irony!

How can one build a truly portable Vim in the USB stick?

Discussion

Searching “git portable home path” on Google, I found an article about setting $HOME and SSL keys for GitHub. However, it was written several years ago. In the current version of Git for Windows, git-bash.bat doesn’t even exist.

Another search result was a Stack Overflow question. I tried copying dgw’s wrapper into git-bash-portable.bat. I adapted it to my installed copy of Git Portable by changing the extension name at the last line from bat to exe. Unluckily, it took a long time to load the Portable Git Bash on clicking the batch file.

Solution

I found Jason Cemra’s comment on issue #320 of Git for Windows on GitHub extremely useful.

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rem Setup environment (replace 'user' with your desired username)
set HOMEDRIVE=%~d0
set HOME=home/owner
set USERPROFILE=%HOME%

rem Launch the git bash
start git-bash.exe

I borrow the line set HOMEDRIVE=%~d0 from dgw since the drive letter of the USB can change. This facilitates the process of adjusting the path of the origin when it comes to pushing a non-bare Git repository in the USB device to a bare one in the same device. (If the Win* machine doesn’t have Git and Vim installed, I use the ones in my USB stick. Otherwise, I use the installed versions of those softwares.)

Remarks

Since the shell of a Vim session invoked by Git Bash is automatically set to /usr/bin/bash, it is expected that Zaadi’s VIMRC configuration for automatic installation of Vundle works. Though I’m using the version written two years ago, it still functions well.

To write in $\rm \LaTeX$ on every Win* 7 device, I also copied the Mik$\rm \TeX$ Portable from my laptop to my USB stick.

I practised my sed skills by using sed '2 i set HOMEDRIVE=%~d0' to insert contents before the second line.