Git GUI: how to change the locale

Question

On my German Windows, when launching git gui it occurs in hard-to-understand German. How can I change it to the default English? The Git GUI options menu item does not offer such an option.

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '11 at 08:16

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Just set the environment variable LANG to the value en_US.

answered May 23 '11 at 08:16

Stefan Näwe

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or... LANG=C LANGUAGE=C will always fall back to standard C locale (which will not require any locales on your system). You might miss some 'niceties' in the en_US[.UTF8] locales, but it will work; git is charset agnostic, so it won't hurt – sehe May 23 '11 at 09:10
Can someone confirm this actually fixes the problem? The OP is asking about forcing `git gui` on Windows to `en_US`. I tried the opposite, forcing `set LANG=de_DE`, and it dot NOT force `git gui` to German. Using `2.14.1.windows`. – tresf Nov 20 '17 at 16:35

Petr Abdulin · Answer 2 · 2011-05-30T04:11:59.587

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Just guessing: if it uses localization files, you can either delete German localization file (it most probably will fallback to English) or create duplicate of English and replace German with it.

edited May 30 '11 at 04:11

answered May 22 '11 at 17:25

Petr Abdulin

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woah. deleting the locale files. crappy advice IMHO – sehe May 23 '11 at 09:10
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That was just guessing, considering user tried and haven't found a way to do it 'legally' (> "The Git GUI options menu item does not offer such an option"). – Petr Abdulin May 23 '11 at 10:09
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Worked for me. Just as advice: The path to the language file is `\share\git-gui\lib\msgs\.msg` for Windows 64Bit. I simply renamed it so I can fall back to this one day. – slevon Feb 10 '13 at 20:53
Worked like a charm, deleted Russian. – Ruslan Gerasimov Apr 03 '15 at 09:08

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 18 '14 at 20:09

This is a very old question and I am aware that the proper answer has already been given and accepted, but in case someone skips it and decides to go with Petr Abdulin's approach (because the accepted answer didn't work for them, they didn't want to change their LANG environment variable...), adding an extra extension to the currently used translation (not always common sense) will also work in this specific situation - making your system fallback to English and keep your non-English translation file intact.

When doing things in such a way, you always want to keep a backup of the original files, even if you think you will never ever need them again or assume it will automatically work just because it works in most situations. Don't copy files and blindly replace. Assume this will not work and you may need to retrieve your original file back without major hassle.

The choice for the extension is up to you. For German translations:

de.msg -> de.msg.bak (do not use .bak if it conflicts with auto-backups)
de.msg -> de.msg.original (non-standard, but slightly more intuitive)

To cancel the fallback process, simply remove the additional extension.

de.msg.bak -> de.msg

If you can properly set your configuration, don't touch the files and do that instead.

Only use this quickfix of your issue as a workaround for what you should actually do.

Git GUI: how to change the locale

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