The Ultimate Git Alias Setup on OS X (brew)

git-aliases.md

The Ultimate Git Alias Setup on OS X (brew)

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.

# .bash_profile

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 .bash_profile, it will automatically create completion-aware g<alias> bash aliases for each of your git aliases.

if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion
fi

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

for al in `__git_aliases`; do
    alias g$al="git $al"
    complete_func=_git_$(__git_aliased_command $al)
    function_exists $complete_fnc && __git_complete g$al $complete_func
done

To make this code working on OS X, you need to install both git and bash-completion via brew,

 brew install bash-completion

Please note, if you have default version of git installed in your system it WON'T WORK. You must have git installed via homebrew.

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.

Global git configuration file:

[alias]
    # one-line log
    l = log --pretty=format:"%C(yellow)%h\\ %ad%Cred%d\\ %Creset%s%Cblue\\ [%cn]" --decorate --date=short

    a = add
    ap = add -p
    c = commit --verbose
    ca = commit -a --verbose
    cm = commit -m
    cam = commit -a -m
    m = commit --amend --verbose
    
    d = diff
    ds = diff --stat
    dc = diff --cached

    s = status -s
    co = checkout
    cob = checkout -b
    # list branches sorted by last modified
    b = "!git for-each-ref --sort='-authordate' --format='%(authordate)%09%(objectname:short)%09%(refname)' refs/heads | sed -e 's-refs/heads/--'"

    # list aliases
    la = "!git config -l | grep alias | cut -c 7-"

See Must Have Git Aliases for more.