The title is a little bit misleading, because this post is going to cover both a Git and a Bash tip. But this is my blog, so I title my posts the way I want.
Please, bring on some tips!
This is a tiny little trick that may be useful only if you ask Git to fulfil your wishes using the command line. Which you should probably be doing at this point, if you want to call yourself a real developer.
Git commands are totally long and totally hard to remember. True. But what if they could be shortened?
Well, in a way, git commands can be shortened. Or at least, adapted to your personal preferences, thanks to aliases.
Aliases can be global or specific to a repository. For example, if you are bored of typing:
$ git pull origin
You can create a “local” alias:
$ git config alias.po pull origin
And from that moment on, you can just do this:
$ git po
And voilà.
If you want to apply the alias to all your repos:
$ git config --global alias.po push origin
And voilà again.
My favorite? This one:
$ git config alias.last 'show -s HEAD^commit' $ git last
Cool, but what about the bash tip?
Yep, I have one of those as well.
bash (the only true Unix shell) allows the creation of shortcuts to certain commands, called alias. For example, if you find yourself typing a thousand times a day the following command:
$ git checkout master
Wouldn’t it be neat to be able to just type the following?
$ go master
Well, that’s easy to do in just to steps. First, edit the bash configuration:
$ pico /.bashrc
Now add the following alias to that file:
alias go="git checkout"
Save and exit, and force bash to refresh:
$ . /.bashrc
(Note the space between the first dot and the curly-thingy-that-we-use-in-Spanish-on-top-of-the-letter-n-to-make-it-sound-funny)
Now, when you want to checkout a branch, just do:
$ go dev/my-development-branch
Ain’t that neat?