How does one disable Git's HTML help (on Windows)?

For Linux systems you could set this with git config --global help.format <web|man|info>. Unfortunately the man pages are not part of the Git for Windows bundle so only 'web' works.

This is a frail workaround, but if you just want a quick usage summary, feed the git sub-command of your choice a deliberately bad option name. I tried "--halp". For example:

$ git stash --halperror: unknown option for 'stash save': --halp       To provide a message, use git stash save -- '--halp'usage: git core\git-stash list [<options>]   or: git core\git-stash show [<stash>]   or: git core\git-stash drop [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]   or: git core\git-stash ( pop | apply ) [--index] [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]   or: git core\git-stash branch <branchname> [<stash>]   or: git core\git-stash [save [--patch] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-q|--quiet]                       [-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [<message>]]   or: git core\git-stash clear

I can't say for sure that "halp" will always be rejected, but it seems to get the job done. Hopefully it'll never get interpreted as a usable parameter. This is probably better than random typing, for example, since you might randomly type in correct input.

In windows

git <command> -h

will write help to the terminal output

git <command> --help 

will pop up a browser window