The Ultimate Git Alias Setup

git-aliases.md

The Ultimate Git Alias Setup

If you use git on the command-line, you'll eventually find yourself wanting aliases for your most commonly-used commands. It's incredibly useful to be able to explore your repos with only a few keystrokes that eventually get hardcoded into muscle memory.

Some people don't add aliases because they don't want to have to adjust to not having them on a remote server. Personally, I find that having aliases doesn't mean I that forget the underlying commands, and aliases provide such a massive improvement to my workflow that it would be crazy not to have them.

The simplest way to add an alias for a specific git command is to use a standard bash alias.

# .bashrc

alias s="git status -s"

The disadvantage of this is that it isn't integrated with git's own alias system, which lets you define git commands or external shell commands that you call with git <alias>. This has some nice advantages:

• integration with git's default bash completion for subcommand arguments
• ability to store your git aliases separately from your bash aliases
• ability to see all your aliases and their corresponding commands using git config

If you add the following code to your .bashrc on a system with the default git bash completion scripts installed, it will automatically create completion-aware g<alias> bash aliases for each of your git aliases.

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then
    . /etc/bash_completion                                                                                                                                                                
fi


function_exists() {
    declare -f -F $1 > /dev/null
    return $?
}

for al in `git config --list | grep -oP '(?<=alias\.)\w+'`; do
    alias g$al="git $al"
    
    complete_func=_git_$(__git_aliased_command $al)
    function_exists $complete_fnc && __git_complete g$al $complete_func
done

The main downside to this approach is that it will make your terminal take a little longer to load.

My aliases

Here are the aliases I use constantly in my workflow. I'm lazy about remembering many other aliases that I've decided I should be using, which this setup is great for because I can always list them all using gla.

[alias]
        s = status
        b = branch
        l = log --pretty=format:"%C(yellow)%h\\ %ad%Cred%d\\ %Creset%s%Cblue\\ [%cn]" --decorate --date=short
        a = add
        cm = commit -m
        d = diff
        ds = diff --stat
        dm = diff master@{1}
        co = checkout
        com = checkout master
        cob = checkout -b
        la = !git config --list | grep -oP '(?<=alias.).+' 
        st = stash
        stp = stash pop

See Must Have Git Aliases for more.