Pimp my git

Now that I’m starting to use git more regularly I’ve started looking for ways to make git even better. It turns out that git’s really easy to customise.

Aliases

Having recently heard that “git stage” is going to be added as an alias for “git add” another git fan mentioned that you can add your own git aliases to the .git/config file. I particularly like this idea as some of the commands can be a little bit esoteric. To get you started try adding this entry to your .git/config file.

[alias]
  stage = add
  unstage = reset HEAD

Now you can add content to the staging area using

  git stage new_file

and then remove it again using

  git unstage new_file

Pretty log

This one’s an alias, just add it in the same way as stage/unstage

plog = log --pretty=tformat:'%h %Cblue%cr%Creset %cn %Cgreen%s%Creset'

I find this format much easier to read, colour coded information and you can fit lot’s more commits on screen. This makes the graph version of log awesome, take a look

git plog --graph

Win!

Colour coded status

Add the following to .git/config and staged files will be shown in green, unstaged in red.

[color]
  ui = auto

Command line prompt

The git-prompt project will let you customise your prompt to include all sorts of git information, the defaults are a bit full on but you can tame it to your taste easily enough

I’m sure I’ll keep adding to this list, let me know any great git tricks you’ve got.

This entry was posted on June 24th, 2009 and is filed under git. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.