How do I force git to use LF instead of CR+LF under windows?

The proper way to get LF endings in Windows is to first set core.autocrlf to false:

git config --global core.autocrlf false

You need to do this if you are using msysgit, because it sets it to true in its system settings.

Now git won’t do any line ending normalization. If you want files you check in to be normalized, do this: Set text=auto in your .gitattributes for all files:

* text=auto

And set core.eol to lf:

git config --global core.eol lf

Now you can also switch single repos to crlf (in the working directory!) by running

git config core.eol crlf

After you have done the configuration, you might want git to normalize all the files in the repo. To do this, go to to the root of your repo and run these commands:

git rm --cached -rf .
git diff --cached --name-only -z | xargs -n 50 -0 git add -f

If you now want git to also normalize the files in your working directory, run these commands:

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm
git checkout .

I come back to this answer fairly often, though none of these are quite right for me. That said, the right answer for me is a mixture of the others.

What I find works is the following:

 git config --global core.eol lf
 git config --global core.autocrlf input

For repos that were checked out after those global settings were set, everything will be checked out as whatever it is in the repo – hopefully LF (\n). Any CRLF will be converted to just LF on checkin.

With an existing repo that you have already checked out – that has the correct line endings in the repo but not your working copy – you can run the following commands to fix it:

git rm -rf --cached .
git reset --hard HEAD

This will delete (rm) recursively (r) without prompt (-f), all files except those that you have edited (--cached), from the current directory (.). The reset then returns all of those files to a state where they have their true line endings (matching what's in the repo).

If you need to fix the line endings of files in a repo, I recommend grabbing an editor that will let you do that in bulk like IntelliJ or Sublime Text, but I'm sure any good one will likely support this.

The OP added in his question:

the files checked out using msysgit are using CR+LF and I want to force msysgit to get them with LF

A first simple step would still be in a .gitattributes file:

# 2010
*.txt -crlf

# 2020
*.txt text eol=lf 

(as noted in the comments by grandchild, referring to .gitattributes End-of-line conversion), to avoid any CRLF conversion for files with correct eol.

And I have always recommended git config --global core.autocrlf false to disable any conversion (which would apply to all versioned files)

See Best practices for cross platform git config?

Since Git 2.16 (Q1 2018), you can use git add --renormalize . to apply those .gitattributes settings immediately.

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But a second more powerful step involves a gitattribute filter driver and add a smudge step

Whenever you would update your working tree, a script could, only for the files you have specified in the .gitattributes, force the LF eol and any other formatting option you want to enforce.
If the "clear" script doesn't do anything, you will have (after commit) transformed your files, applying exactly the format you need them to follow.