<i>&gt; but fundamentally you&#x27;re still installing msys (2) to run git.</i><p>You&#x27;re installing msys to run git because (I guess) it was considered the git CLI would be useless without a decent shell. Would you see yourself use Git or Mercurial in cmd?<p>Git itself in Git for Windows, afaik, is not actually an msys program, and uses native win32 APIs.