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Strange. It found git on my system automatically without any trouble.

Just because you did't make an effort to actually look for these things, that doesn't mean that they don't exist: https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Git-Executable.html.

What part of IGNORING THE PATH ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE you didn't understand? Magit is too clever for its own good.

From that link:

> This is necessary because Git on that platform comes with several wrapper scripts for the actual git binary, which are also placed on $PATH, and using one of these wrappers instead of the binary would degrade performance horribly.

That sounds like a good reason to be clever.

I can't imagine how painful it must be to develop software on windows.

Most of the pain comes from the fact that support for command line (and even things like concept of current directory) is bolted onto the win16 inspired win32 API as a complete afterthought.

Things that are implemented as command line utilities or call such commandline utilities (which includes Visual Studio and Windows SDK!) tend to cause these cludges to become painfully apparent.