Git has been integrated in Visual Studio’s Team Explorer for quite a few years now, and personally I think it does the job. Common features have been integrated in a nice user interface and honestly that’s what I tend to use on a daily basis.

Having said that there are still scenarios where I need to type Git commands, such as pulling from a remote branch (if this feature was integrated in Team Explorer I never found it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). That’s when I start up a command line instance from within Visual Studio itself, and I do this from within the Manage Connections screen as below.

It’s great, it works and it does the job, but is it convenient? Not always. I needed a more efficient way and after a bit of research I discovered that the Package Manager Console which is inbuilt in Visual Studio, and which is also used to manage your Nuget packages, can be used as a Git command line. Fantastic, I don’t need to open a separate window each time. I just need to have the Package Manager Console window open at the bottom of Visual Studio along with the Error List and Output windows.

If you want to take it up a notch from here what you can do is install PoshGit. Taken from GitHub “posh-git is a PowerShell module that integrates Git and PowerShell by providing Git status summary information that can be displayed in the PowerShell prompt“. In my own words, an IntelliSense for Git.

Other options include BuiltinCmd and Whack Whack Terminal, extensions which you download from the Marketplace and install in Visual Studio.

Until next blog post,
Bjorn