how do i get git to show command-line help in windows?

Use git <command> -h instead of --help or help. It works in all recent versions of Git for Windows, but gives only the short usage, not the full description.

Issue 187 issue 696 does report:

The main problem is that we do ship neither man.exe nor the man pages.
Otherwise, you could set help.format to 'man' in /etc/gitconfig.

So right now, this isn't possible...

As jamiebarrow adds in the comments:

You could also try installing man yourself

MinGW-get install msys-man. 

man is also available as a windows binary: (found via the mingw FAQ). That page also has groff.

As mentioned in "Getting Started - Getting Help", those three commands invokes the man page, but only in its HTML version:

$ git help <verb>
$ git <verb> --help
$ man git-<verb>

git <verb> -h does not print the man page, only the short usage section (nothing to do with man)

I've just spent some time researching the subject, and these are my conclusions:

• msysgit ships with .html and .txt documentation, the latter being well suited for reading on the console; however, no option for directly displaying the txt exists. help.format only supports web/man/info

• there's no way to coax the 'web' format for that purpose - I tried renaming the .txt files to .html and setting my git web.browser to more (together with browser.more.cmd), only to find out that the windows implementation of Git ignores these settings and launches the html file directly (i.e. in the default browser): http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.msysgit/10798

• unless you want to install and use cygwin, there's no easy way to use man or info either - you'll need to download a port of the executable, together with its dependencies (groff, etc), configure it, and download the manpages manually

In the end I resolved for the simplest approach:

githelp.bat: @more "C:\Program Files\Git\doc\git\html\%1.txt"

githelpfind.bat: @dir /b "C:\Program Files\Git\doc\git\html\*.txt" | find "%1"

Usage:

\> githelpfind prune
git-prune-packed.txt
git-prune.txt

\> githelp git-prune
(blah blah blah)

A little more typing this way, but a functional solution.

I just have been researching online and found out that, unless you want to install and use cygwin, there's no easy way to use man.

So if you are in a bit hurry to resolve your error, I would recommend you to just use git. You should be able to see the common Git Commands used in various situations.

git help -a and git help -g list available subcommands and some concept guides. See git help <command> or git help <concept> to read about a specific subcommand or concept. See git help git for an overview of the system.

I hope this helps you! ;)