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Gedalya Krycer
Gedalya Krycer

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OhSnap! Handy Terminal & Git Commands

#productivity #beginners #git #webdev

The "OhSnap!" series explores bite-sized tips that you can apply today.

Here is a list of some helpful terminal and git commands for your viewing pleasure and my own future reference. 😉

Terminal Commands

Working With Spaces 

cd Class\ Work
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cd 'Class Work'
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  • Use a backslash (\) to make "Class\ Work" equal "Class Work”.

  • Encapsulate the phrase with quote marks to preserve spaces between words.

Open project folder in VS Code 

cd my-project-folder-name 

code .
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Only show directories 

ls -d */
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Clear the terminal 

cmd + k
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clear
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Go back to the main directory 

cd ~
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Show permissions 

ls -l
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Create a file 

touch index.html
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Create a folder/directory 

mkdir my-project
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Removes a file 

rm index.html
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Remove a folder 

rm -r my-project
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-r stands for “recursive”. It means to delete this thing and everything in it.

Copy a file/folder 

cp img images
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The first value is the original file/folder and the second value is what it is copied as.

Rename a file/folder name 

mv old-name.html new-name.html
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The first value is the original file/folder name and the second value is the new name.

Open folder in Finder 

open .
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Getting unstuck from hard-to-exit terminal screens 

shift + z
shift + z
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Git Commands

Show available local branches 

git branch
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Create new branch 

git checkout -b feature-1
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  • checkout moves to the new branch
  • -b creates a new branch
  • feature-1 name for branch

Push local branch to remote 

git push origin feature-1
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Switch to a new branch 

git checkout main
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Merge changes from one branch to another 

git merge master
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  1. Navigate to the branch you want to work in
  2. After the merge keyword, specify the branch that has the changes to be merged from

Grab all remote branches without merging 

git fetch --all
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Reset the local master with the remote version 

git reset --hard origin/master
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Remove non-committed changes from all branches and master since 

git checkout -f
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View differences between commits 

git diff
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To leave this view hit Q on the keyboard

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Top comments (3)

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair •

Couple of tips:

cmd + k is going to be specific to MacOS. ctrl + l will work on pretty much any terminal emulator and is also often bound to things like "redraw" in apps as well.

cd ~ will take you to your home directory, but also so will cd on its own.

Opening the current directory in apps, like with code . and open . is the same as passing the complete current path. open is a Mac-specific (in this case) program which dispatches the path parameter to whatever application is associated with "folder" (again, in this case). On Linux you'd do something like xdg-open if you have a GUI, or even something else depending on your configuration. On Windows I suspect you're SOL.
This means if you have something associated with .js files in your GUI (e.g. Finder) then open foo.js will launch that application, regardless of what it is. In that case, open is a tiny bit easier because you can share code using it with others and it'll work even if they use something else like Sublime.

I have a whole rant about using touch to create files.

git diff
To leave this view hit Q on the keyboard

I'm guessing you have less as your pager for git diffs. It doesn't have to be that way though, and even if you do there's a good chance it's not called if there's nothing to diff!

Getting unstuck from hard-to-exit terminal screens

What do you mean by this? What terminal screens are getting stuck? The only time I know ZZ as a shortcut it's an alternative way to save and exit Vim.

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gedalyakrycer profile image
Gedalya Krycer •

Thanks for leaving feedback and additional explanations. Regarding your question at the end, I do believe the screen was a VIM editor. It sometimes comes up when I am working with git.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair •

Gotcha.

If you're using Vim to edit git commit messages and don't want to, I think there's a git config setting. Failing that, I imagine setting something like;

export EDITOR=$(command -v code)
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in your shell config would let you use VS Code instead (or whatever you want)

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