Teaching Git Some New Tricks

#git #gitnewbie #gitmaster #gitninja

First (second) dev.to article! Learn to hit the save button, Jonathan!

You can create aliases both on the repo level and globally just by adding or omitting the --global flag.

Creating aliases is easy. Just type git config --global alias.co checkout to create a global alias for git checkout. Now, all you have to do is type git co develop. Awesome, right?

Some commands have flags you can add. For example, the checkout command allows you to optionally create and checkout a new branch with the -b flag. Git handles these aliases with ease by just surrounding the command with quotes. I like to use cob for that.

git config --global alias.cob "checkout -b"

Now, to create a new branch, I just type git cob new_branch_name.

Here are some of my favorite aliases:

st status
co checkout
cob checkout -b
lol log --oneline

If you want to chain commands together, which begin with git, you have to prefix that with a bang (!).

Say I wanted to stash my changes and do a pull in one command. Let's call this alias "shelve". I would type the following:

git config --global alias.shelve "!git stash && git pull"

I'm liking dev.to so far and I hope to write some more articles. I especially like talking about Git.

Reference: git config

Top comments (12)

Brad Bodine • Jul 21 '18

That is good stuff, the only issue with this is that if you become dependent on these specific commands and you have to use a different environment (someone else's machine) you could forget the actual commands.

I use text expander on osx to do similar things with common git commands.

Just something to keep in mind. 😁

Mihail Malo • Aug 8 '18

You could always quickly source your alias config from let's say a gist.

Jonathan Irvin • Jul 21 '18

Oh yeah, for sure. I strongly advocate learning the commands before making an alias. But if you switch workspaces as much as I do, I'm creating aliases as much as I'm typing the full command.