I use git from the command line as part of my regular workflow. Configuring aliases saves just a few keystrokes, but those keystrokes add up (My bash history says I’ve executed git commands 121 times in my current shell session, which has spanned about two workdays).
I have git itself aliased to g in my ~/.bashrc. git allows aliasing subcommands in the [alias] section of ~/.gitconfig. Below are my aliases in workflow order:
Fetch & Checkout
To kick it off, I typically git fetch from remote to make sure git is aware of the branches that exist on the remote end. Then I git checkout the branch that I want to work on, whether the branch already exists on the remote end or I create it locally. Those two commands look like g f and g co with the following aliases:
f = fetch
co = checkout
Status & Diff
To see what’s changed, I use git status and git diff often.
git status will just list the files that have changed since the last commit (both staged and unstaged). I have it aliased as g s
Sometimes I want to see changes that have not yet been staged for a commit (plain git diff), and other times I want to see only the changes that have been staged for a commit (git diff --staged). With the following aliases, those will end up looking like g d and g ds.
s = status
d = diff
ds = diff --staged
Add
I typically stage changes wholesale instead of adding file-by-file; that’s the behavior of git add --all, which I aliased as g a. Sometimes, though, it’s better to add only some of the parts of a file that have changed and not others. That’s possible with git add --patch, aliased as g ap.
a = add --all
ap = add --patch
Commit
Once I’ve staged everything I want to include in a changeset, it’s time to git commit. My first alias, g c, expands to git commit -v. The behavior of the -v flag is described in git’s manpage like this:
-v, --verbose
Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what would be committed at the bottom of the commit message template to help the user describe the commit by reminding what changes the commit has.
Note that this diff output doesn't have its lines prefixed with #. This diff will not be a part of the commit message.
Occasionally, I make a typo in the commit message, or I forget a small change that I want to slip into the commit I just made. Both scenarios involve git commit --amend, which I’ve alased as g ca.
c = commit -v
ca = commit --amend
Trim
Over the course of a few weeks (or a couple of intense days), I may end up with a few dozen feature branches in one repo, most of which have been merged into master. To clean up the branches that have been merged, I use the following alias, which executes a shell command:
trim = "!sh -c 'git branch --merged | grep -v \"\\*\\|master\\|production\" | xargs -n1 git branch -d'"
This lists all of the branches that have been merged, drops master, production, and the current branch from that list, and then passes the final list to git branch -d to delete them.
All Together
Here’s the whole thing:
[alias]
f = fetch
co = checkout
d = diff
ds = diff --staged
a = add --all
ap = add --patch
s = status
c = commit -v
ca = commit --amend
trim = "!sh -c 'git branch --merged | grep -v \"\\*\\|master\\|production\" | xargs -n1 git branch -d'"