Cédric Champeau's blog: My Git tweaks for daily usage

A few tricks for daily Git usage

Since Groovy switched to Git for version control, and more recently to GitHub for hosting, I’ve had great pleasure working with this tool. In this post, I’ll just show you some basic tricks that I use on a daily basis.

Adding the git branch to the Bash prompt

My first tweak is to have my bash prompt show me the current branch I’m working on. This is very handy. I borrowed the setup from this pastebin but unfortunately, I can’t find the original author. Note that it also adds support for svn. Add the following to your .bashrc file:

#GIT
simple_git_branch() {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\1/'
}

parse_git_branch() {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(git::\1)/'
}
parse_svn_branch() {
  parse_svn_url | sed -e 's#^'"$(parse_svn_repository_root)"'##g' | awk -F / '{print "(svn::"$1 "/" $2 ")"}'
}
parse_svn_url() {
  svn info 2>/dev/null | grep -e '^URL*' | sed -e 's#^URL: *\(.*\)#\1#g '
}
parse_svn_repository_root() {
  svn info 2>/dev/null | grep -e '^Repository Root:*' | sed -e 's#^Repository Root: *\(.*\)#\1\/#g '
}
export PS1="\[\033[00m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \[\033[31m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\$(parse_svn_branch) \[\033[00m\]$\[\033[00m\] "

Some aliases

All those aliases must be added to your .gitconfig file into the [alias] section.

One thing I’m doing often with Groovy development is to fix some bug into a branch, then backport the fix to other branches. My preferred tool for this is cherry-pick. Cherry picking a commit is really easy, but to make it even easier, I’m using an alias that shows me the hash of the last commit on a branch:

[alias]
 last = log --oneline -n 1

Then calling git last will show me the hash of the commit to be cherry-picked. Another problem is that git cherry-pick is a bit long to type, especially if you do this often, and git cherry doesn’t get autocompleted when you press tab, so I’m using another alias for cherry-picking:

[alias]
 cp = cherry-pick

If you are used to svn, you also know that co is an alias for checkout so I’m adding this too:

[alias]
 co = checkout

Eventually, here is a nice history view of commits:

[alias]
 hist = log --oneline --graph --decorate --all

That’s all, those aliases are currently the only ones I’m using on a daily basis, but of course, I’m relatively new to git, so there are chances that new aliases will show up in the future!