Remove MINGW64 from Git Bash on Windows

In the Git Bash terminal on Windows, the MINGW64 purple text is displayed.

In this step-by-step tutorial, I’ll explain MINGW64, why it shows up by default, and how to remove it to save some visual space.

Let’s get started!

🎥Prefer a video instead? Watch this:

What is MINGW64?

The MINGW64 purple text indicates that you are running Git Bash within a Minimalist GNU for Windows 64-bit environment.

You can reconfirm this by running the following command:

echo $MSYSTEM
# MINGW64

MinGW offers Unix-style tools such as ls, cd or vim and a Bash shell for Git operations.

The MinGW text can be useful when you have installed both 32-bit (MINGW32) and 64-bit (MINGW64) Git versions as it can differentiate between the two.

But we don’t usually need to see this text, so let’s remove it.

Remove MINGW64

Open your favorite text editor as Administrator.

Then open the C:\Program Files\Git\etc\profile.d\git-prompt.sh file.

Comment these two lines out by adding a # before them:

	#PS1="$PS1"'\[\033[35m\]'       # change to purple
	#PS1="$PS1"'$MSYSTEM '          # show MSYSTEM

Reopen the Git Bash terminal and notice that the MINGW64 text is no longer displayed 🎉

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