Aliases for git

Even if you’re not a developer, when you’re working with open-source projects, you come in contact with git all the time.
Git is our preferred SCM solution and we use it extensively in our open-source and internal projects.

Aliases

Git is really nice and it allows you to define aliases in your ~/.gitconfig.

Here are some simple aliases I use in my git config:

[alias]
    st = status
    ci = commit
    co = checkout
    br = branch

Now you should be able to run git st  instead of git status. The same for ci, co and br.

Because we do some rebasing in our projects, I have also some aliases in place for that:

[alias]
    cia = commit --amend
    pushf = push --force
    pullf = pull --force
    rb = rebase
    rbi = rebase -i
    rbc = rebase --continue

Logging in git is quite powerful, but you need to specify a lot of different flags to get a nice output.
Check out these aliases:

[alias]
    logg = log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate --all --format=format:'%C(bold cyan)%h%C(reset) - %C(yellow)[%ar]%C(reset) %C(white)%s%C(reset)%C(green bold)%d%C(reset) %C(dim white)- %aN%C(reset)'
    hist = log --pretty=format:'%C(bold cyan)%h%C(reset) - %C(yellow)[%ad]%C(reset) %C(white)%s%C(green bold)%d%C(reset) %C(dim white)- %aN%C(reset)'

Go to a project and hit git logg to see a tree / graph of the full commit history.
You can also run git logg to display a simple but nice version of the commit history.

If you need to get more informations about a blob, tree commit or tag, you’ve to use the cat-file feature, which I can’t remember and therefor I created two new aliases:

[alias]
    type = cat-file -t
    print = cat-file -p

Just hit git print <commit> to display more informations about a commit.

ZSH prompt

If you’re also using zsh and oh-my-zsh, you should really have a look at the powerlevel9k theme, which has a neat prompt for git repos.
We already mentioned that in our zsh: A shell on steroids blog post.