Over the past few months, I’ve developed a few shortcuts that make using git a little easier & quicker. Here are a some of them… I’ve added these only as I noticed that I was typing the same thing repeatedly. These are defined in my .bashrc
List or use the currently active branch
function gbc() {
git branch | sed -n -e "/^\*/ p " | cut -c 3-99
}
export -f gbc
Now if I want to see what the latest branch is, I simply type gbc and the current branch is displayed. What’s even more useful, IMO, is that I can now use that function to display the current branch in my bash prompt using something like this:
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:[\W-$(gbc)]\w\$ '
and now my prompt looks like this:
jseidel@EDP28:[shakespeare_analyzer-master]~/dev/coding/shakespeare_analyzer$
I’ve got mine color-coded (MUCH longer PS1 string) so that the branch name really stands out and I can see immediately where I am.
Quickly add modified (but not new) files
I frequently have a few untracked files in my repo which I do not want to add to the repo, so git adding everything doesn’t work for me. To deal with this, I created a gadauto command.
function gadauto() {
git status | ack 'modified:|deleted:' gst.txt | sed -Ee 's/modified:|deleted://' | xargs git add
}
export -f gadauto
Now a quick gadauto command adds modified or deleted files to the staging area and leaves my untracked files alone.
Quickly add to and amend a commit
We use git-review (great tool, IMO) and the preferred workflow is to first create a new commit and then amend that commit until you’re ready to push it for review. The command to do that, of course, is git commit --amend. To shorten this, I created a simple alias:
alias gcamd='git commit --amend'
Now when I’m ready to add my updated files and amend the commit, all I have to do is type:
gadauto && gcamd
I could shorten that even more but I like to type just a bit more when I could make a messy mistake… like accidentally ‘amending’ against HEAD from master.
Quickly add merge conflicts that have been resolved
The gadauto command works great but doesn’t handle the use case for files that have been conflicted and then resolved during a git rebase, for example. Handling this is just a simple modification of the gadauto command described above.
function gadboth() {
git status | ack 'both modified:|both added:' gst.txt | sed -Ee 's/both modified:|both added://' | xargs git add
}
export -f gadboth
Now, following a git rebase master and conflict resolution, I just type:
gadboth
and all of the files that were just resolved are added to the staging area, ready for the git rebase --continue.
Hopefully this will help someone; I’d be interested to know what your favorite git shortcuts are.
Update
Well… I can see that thoughtbot’s gitconfig offerings are quite sophisticated so I’ll have to check them out.