Recently I’ve had a few chats with engineers where I mention a git helper thing, and they hadn’t heard of it. So maybe other people would like to hear about them too:
tig is a full-window terminal UI for git. It’s great for spelunking through a git repo, looking at branches, history, blames, and so on. For a quick overview of what it does, this old blog post from Atlassian describes it pretty well.
You should play with it to see all of its features. To be honest, I haven’t quite internalized how it displays new panes, but I still love it for its speedy compact presentation of just the information I want.
hub is a command-line tool for doing GitHub things that are not pure git, or for supplying helpful GitHub-centric defaults. For example, cloning a repo with “hub clone username/repo”, or opening a pull request for the current branch with “hub pr”. It can do a ton of stuff. If you use a lot of GitHub features, but like the command line, you should definitely give it a try.
A global .gitignore file is like the .gitignore file in your repos: it specifies files that should never be committed to git. But instead of being part of a specific repo, this one is global to all of your repos on your machine. This is great for IDE-specific files, or data files for your own quirky tools.
Do you have other good helpers to recommend?
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2. Here's a way to make git log more compact and informational.
Add the following to your ~/.gitconfig file:
[alias] logp = log --pretty=format:'%C(red)%h %C(blue)%<(16,mtrunc)%an %C(green)%<(21,trunc)%ci%x08%x08 %C(reset)%s %C(yellow)%D%C(reset)'Now try git logp in a repo.It's a very simple user interface with support to staging parts of the files, ammending, loading previous commit messages.
With it you are able to make gitconfigs conditional.
I use it so it auto-switches between my working and personal email depending on a folder name.
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