2/19/2015 Update: I’ve decided that it would be good to propose the change described in this post to the msysgit project. And today it was accepted and merged. It took me only 7 months to come up with idea that the change described below could be included into the official release of the software that I’m using on a daily basis :)

Maybe a year or something ago I switched from Console2 to ConEmu. One of the reasons behind this switch was a Task concept that ConEmu offered.

There was only one problem with my tasks setup - I wanted to launch Portable Git which is a part of GitHub for Windows installation inside ConEmu. But launching the git-cmd.bat from ConEmu will create a new window.

As you may know Portable Git binaries are located in %LOCALAPPDATA%\GitHub\PortableGit_054f2e797ebafd44a30203088cd3d58663c627ef\ Note that the last part of the directory name is a version string so it could change in future.

The problem lies in the last line of the git-cmd.bat file:

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@rem Do not use "echo off" to not affect any child calls.
@setlocal

@rem Get the abolute path to the current directory, which is assumed to be the
@rem Git installation root.
@for /F "delims=" %%I in ("%~dp0") do @set git_install_root=%%~fI
@set PATH=%git_install_root%\bin;%git_install_root%\mingw\bin;%git_install_root%\cmd;%PATH%

@if not exist "%HOME%" @set HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%
@if not exist "%HOME%" @set HOME=%USERPROFILE%

@set PLINK_PROTOCOL=ssh
@if not defined TERM set TERM=msys

@cd %HOME%
@start %COMSPEC%

To fix the issue replace last line @start %COMSPEC% with @call %COMSPEC%.

This change will not break the existing “Open in Git Shell” context action in GitHub application GUI.

The difference between start and call commands is that call runs the batch script inside the same shell instance while start creates a new instance. Here is a little fragment from start and call help:

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C:\>call /?
Calls one batch program from another.

C:\>start /?
Starts a separate window to run a specified program or command.

That’s it! Now following task for ConEmu will work as expected:

*cmd /k Title Git & "%LOCALAPPDATA%\GitHub\PortableGit_054f2e797ebafd44a30203088cd3d58663c627ef\git-cmd.bat"