My Git Aliases

Intro to Git Aliases

If you use Git in your Terminal on daily basis, there's a good chance that you have some bash/zsh aliases for commands that you frequently use. As a matter of fact, oh-my-zsh, a framework for ZSH has these aliases out of the box. For the example:

g       => git
gl      => git pull
gp      => git push
ggpull  => git pull origin $(current_branch)

You can find all the aliases here

But do you know that Git has alias feature out of the box too? It's not the same as bash alias, as we still gonna use git as our first command. For example, if we want to create an alias for checkout, we can do this:

$ git config --global alias.co checkout

Or we can add unstage alias

$ git config --global alias.unstage 'reset HEAD --'

Then you can use this to unstage a file

## This is equivalent to running git reset HEAD -- fileA

$ git unstage fileA

You can check out the official documentation in here

Aliases for Daily Usage

Back on the topic, what's git aliases that I use on daily basis? Actually, I'm using the alias not just for shorthand but also to trigger a Ruby script that will help me to make my workload easier.

1. git recent

Because I had to work with quite a few branches at one time and I tend to forget what I just did, I use this alias a lot. It translates to this:

$ git branch --sort=-committerdate

I wrap this command in a simple Ruby script that enables me to list the recent branch and checkout to the branch I select.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# frozen_string_literal: true

require 'tty-prompt'

git_command = 'git branch --sort=-committerdate'
git_result = `#{git_command}`.chomp.split("\n")

abort('Invalid git command') if git_result.nil?

## Show prompt
prompt = TTY::Prompt.new
label = "Choose branch to checkot:"
selected = prompt.select(label, git_result, filter: true)

system "git checkout #{selected}"

2. git del

If you had too many unused branches, it becomes clutters. It can distract you from doing the actual works or making you more forgetful than you already are 😅 So I have this alias to multi select branches and delete them on one keypress. Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# frozen_string_literal: true

require 'tty-prompt'

## See that I use git recent as my list?
git_command = 'git branch --sort=-committerdate'
git_result = `#{git_command}`.chomp.split("\n")

abort('Invalid git command') if git_result.nil?

## Show prompt
prompt = TTY::Prompt.new
label = "Choose branches to delete:"
selected = prompt.multi_select(label, git_result, filter: true)

selected_string = selected.map(&:chomp).join(' ') if selected.is_a?(Array)

## git branch -D branchA branchB branchC
system "git branch -D #{selected_string}"

3. git today

Now you know how forgetful I can become, this one helps me to remember what commit did I make today. It also filters out your commits from everyone else.

git log --since=midnight --author='E' --oneline

That's it, you can check out my complete git alias and scripts on my dotfiles repo here Until next time.