Popular Git config options

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/02/16/popular-git-config-options/

by ingve • 2 years ago

446 149 2 years ago

leetrout• 2 years ago

Cannot overstate the helpfulness of rerere if you work in a rebase workflow.

Indeed, but be careful not to poison your resolution cache, having a wrong resolution and re-doing a large rebase can be a painful experience.

OJFord5• 2 years ago

Good list, definitely concur with the top ones and can't think of anything major to me that's not listed.

rebase.autosquash combined with an alias I have (called 'fixup') to make that commit and then do the rebase is probably my top one by an absolute long shot, at least in terms of frequency of use. pull.rebase is important to me, but I fixup so frequently, I really don't know how people get by without it.

(Well, I do, generally they create a snaking history by merging master or whatever into their own branch repeatedly, swapping the parents, and make lots of new commits to fix things in the old ones. But I don't know how you can put up with doing that to yourself, is I suppose the long version of what I mean.)

Oh - semi-missed - insteadOf is more useful than implied: I have 'gh:' mapped to the full thing, so I just `git remote add somefork gh:someforker/the-project`, for example.

Some other minor ones: advice.statusHints=false; include.path (if you need it you need it - I use it to set my signing key according to which Yubikey is plugged in, plugging can write the whole file because it's all that's in there, no parsing required); remote "origin".fetch set to get PRs; oh and interactive.singleKey = true if that was missed - not a minor one at all! Makes staging changes so much faster and easier. Obviously not as fast as `add .` or `commit -a`, but don't do that.

NewJazz6• 2 years ago

Another way to get that instead of behavior is with SSH configuration. I have something like this in my ssh config:

    Host github
        Hostname github.com
        User git

Then you can do a "git clone github:microsoft/windows" and you're good to go.

OJFord5• 2 years ago

True. If I'm only using it for git though makes sense to keep the config there IMO. But certainly that's handy when you're sshing interactively or doing other things with that host.

jerpint• 2 years ago

Neat

hinkley2• 2 years ago

This fuckin' guy.

If you've evolved an SSO solution from brownfield, or just merged with another company you can easily end up in a spot where you have 2 user names across the systems, and that's before you get into doing things like pushing bug fixes to Github straight from your work machine.

Make yourself an .ssh/config file. Set your user, and your ssh key for where it matters (I don't use the same key for ssh to servers and for talking to github or bitbucket)

oliv3r• 2 years ago

I really loved the idea of fixup + rebase, but of course we didn't have an example here :)

So I spend half an hour to learn about git shell commands in aliases (had to learn the hardware that arguments require functions) and came up with the following.

fixup = "!f() { git commit --fixup ${1} && GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR=true git rebase --autosquash --interactive --rebase-merges \"${1}~1\"; }; f"

from https://gitlab.com/olliver/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.config/gi...

Hope this helps anybody else :)

oldpersonintx• 2 years ago

init.defaultBranch main

if you think people who use "master" are doing so because they fervently wish to reconstitute slavery, you may be beyond help

even my woke friends who are somewhat rational cringe at this

striking2• 2 years ago

`git init` itself hints that you should globally configure an initial branch name in your git config, and suggests "main", "trunk", and "development" as alternatives. It will continue to make this suggestion until you make a choice. Here's the full output from `git init` with no additional config on my machine:

  hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
  hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
  hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
  hint: 
  hint:  git config --global init.defaultBranch <name>
  hint: 
  hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and
  hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
  hint: 
  hint:  git branch -m <name>
  Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/test/.git/

I think people that set this actually get to that point because they don't want to keep seeing the warning, and "main" is as good a value as any. In light of this, your harsh moral ascription seems fairly silly.

elevatedastalt2• 2 years ago

This was done precisely following the change that OP is hinting towards. Let's not pretend like this was done for a technical reason.

mariusor• 2 years ago

It's not clear what you're complaining about here. The fact that many people use this option, the fact that Julia included it in the article, or the fact that it's an option to change the default branch name in the first place.

Also it's pretty sad that this is the only part of a very informative article that you deigned to comment about.

athorax2• 2 years ago

I think most people don't even remotely care about master vs. main, but it definitely gives me pause when someone is so bothered by another persons choice not to use master.

IshKebab3• 2 years ago

I care, because it introduced a ton of unnecessary pain into my workflow. Yes really. I now have a mix of repos using `master` and `main`, and I have to remember which one to use.

One repo uses `master` but a subtree uses `main`. If you make a mistake and checkout `main` you end up clobbering your whole working tree with the subtree.

I also have tooling that used to happily assume `master`, which worked fine 99% of the time. Now it works 50% of the time, and even worse the name of the main branch is just a convention, so you can't even read a setting to see which one to use.

I don't care about the specific name. `main` would definitely have made more sense from the start (classic terrible Git naming). But I do care about pointlessly changing it and breaking everything.

elevatedastalt2• 2 years ago

This is ironic because this whole thing started _with_ people getting very bothered by the choice of the term master.

quectophoton2• 2 years ago

If I were that bothered by that word I probably wouldn't be able to consume anything coming from Japan.

Also, wait until people find out about what "Spanish main" is (spoiler: still slavery).

keybored• 2 years ago

`git init` whines (hints) if it is not set. GitHub decided to generate 500 StackOverflow answers by switching to `main`, which makes things really confusing if you init locally, create GitHub repo, and try to push to it. Setting it to `main` for me is the path of least resistance since I don’t care either way.

ComputerGuru2• 2 years ago

How to get all your set git options:

    git config --global --get-regexp . | sort -u

A hack I like that makes diffing possibly minified or formatting-mangled source files easier:

    diff.css.textconv css-beautify

(Unminifies and unifies the formatting of css files before diffing them, might need to have the *.css type set in your .gitattributes though)

    core.editor nvim

(Use neovim as the editor for commit messages and other things)

NewJazz6• 2 years ago

You can set the EDITOR env var instead of using core.editor. or setup symlinks with your package manager.

nerdponx3• 2 years ago

I use this to get a list of my configured aliases.

  [alias]
  ls-alias = config --global --includes --get-regexp 'alias\..*'

mkhnews• 2 years ago

Same here -

[alias]

    alias = "!git config --get-regexp ^alias. | sed 's/^alias.//'"

peterhadlaw• 2 years ago

I think a critical one would be: init.defaultBranch master

Especially since places like GitHub are making main the default unwittingly

NewJazz6• 2 years ago

Wait are you saying to keep the default branch as master explicitly?

OJFord5• 2 years ago

Yes, I do it too. 'master' is too ingrained to change and has nothing to do with slavery or anything sinister IMO. If I ever work with someone on a project we're in control of who feels otherwise and affected personally then it won't be much effort to change it. Until then I don't need to pointlessly spend effort rewriting it when I get it wrong on my own projects. (It only affects what git init does.)

LAC-Tech• 2 years ago

IIRC if you don't do that, it will spam you with "the default branch is master, it may change" every time you make a new repo, so you have to set it explicitly to get rid of the nagging.

threemux• 2 years ago

Agreed I have this in my gitconfig. The changing of this setting caused more damage than "master" ever did

globular-toast2• 2 years ago

Yes. GitHub really overstepped the mark by pushing main onto unwitting newbie devs. Really not cool. Almost like they want to control people or something.

samatman4• 2 years ago

I switched to trunk back when the witch hunt started raging. Fossil uses it, it's the original[0] term, and it completes the metaphor. What do the branches branch off? Why the trunk, of course.

As a matter of policy, I refuse to be swayed by the opinions of busybodies as to what is or isn't offensive. I will continue to use blacklists, for example, but am happy to retire the master/slave pairing: it's not a great metaphor to begin with, and a reasonable person can see where those of recent descent from the enslaved might take exception to it.

There's nothing at all wrong with having a master branch, either, the metaphor is entirely anodyne and no honest person takes umbrage at it. But that whole absurd episode got me thinking about the nomenclature, I had been working with Fossil on a hobby project shortly before, and figured that if there's another word which I prefer, I may as well take the opportunity to switch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(version_control)

wakawaka289• 2 years ago

I switched to trunk back when the witch hunt started raging.
As a matter of policy, I refuse to be swayed by the opinions of busybodies as to what is or isn't offensive.

Well, you have said multiple ways that you have been swayed. I agree with you about all of this whining and word-policing coming from people who have dubious intentions. Nobody sane is offended by these terms. It's just a way for "victims" to seek clout and bully everyone else.

Fossil is cool but alas it will never be mainstream. It does have some nice features, but there are technical downsides such as storing files in a single binary sqlite database (which is a benefit for small projects, but a bad solution for large projects). If nothing else, backing up Fossil repos will take an ever-increasing amount of space compared to an equivalent git repo, as git repos can be backed up incrementally.

lobocinza3• 2 years ago

I use main just because it's shorter than master.

arvigeus• 2 years ago

Funny how nobody talks about the aftermath of switching to “main” - did it achieve its original goal? No papers written on it, no researches. Like nobody wants to admit how stupid it was to push for it and insult those who resist it (which ironically achieved the opposite goal of making things more toxic instead of “inclusive”).

wakawaka289• 2 years ago

DEI is proven to divide people. That's why it's embraced with both arms. Switching the branch names has probably wasted tens of thousands of hours of maintenance work in the world. I doubt if there are even a dozen people in the world who were actually offended by the term master in that context or even the master-slave pairing in others. But there are probably hundreds of people at least (out of millions of developers) pretending to be offended for clout.

__turbobrew__• 2 years ago

I have witnessed several outages caused by switching from master to main. Think nobody in a company with thousands of engineers could commit code for half a day.

It really isn’t worth it. I can agree with using ‘main’ when making new repos but trying to shoehorn ‘main’ into existing stuff is a giant pain for little to no gain.

enobrev• 2 years ago

I see an article by Julia, I upvote it. Always excellent. I learn something every time Julia writes something for us to read.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

“80% of people use this, probably take a look”

If an option is used by 80% of users, shouldn't it be the default, and have an option to turn it off for the 20%?

OJFord5• 2 years ago

Not necessarily I'd say, it could be something that's confusing to a newcomer or (or even doesn't make sense) on first use. But that doesn't exist anyway, that was a wish for it to exist. If the tool had it, it could decide to change the defaults as you say, and so the worth-looking-at number would just be 35% or whatever instead.

yegle• 2 years ago

Most people on HN probably disabled "usage report" in all places they can. Otherwise it is possible to produce a report on "which option is more popular".

NelsonMinar2• 2 years ago

There was an interesting discussion about this problem on Mastodon yesterday started by Julia: https://mastodon.social/@b0rk@jvns.ca/111935753657358820

The general conclusion is that relatively few FOSS tools collect usage information the way commercial software now does. Interesting opportunity to potentially improve things.

rcoveson• 2 years ago

Interesting opportunity to potentially improve things.

...you mean by changing commercial software to collect telemetry more like FOSS tools do, i.e. usually not at all, right?

Zardoz84• 2 years ago

I find disturbing that don't mentions kdiff3 with diff and merge tool. Specially when kdiff3 does the smae thing that diff3 and zdiff3 output formats...

I don't understand the popularity of meld. I always felt that meld it's pretty inferior to kdiff3. And I give a few try to it...

cpeterso• 2 years ago

My favorite free (though not open source) visual diff and merge tool is Perforce's P4Merge. It's available for Linux, macOS (including as a Homebrew cask), and Windows. My favorite feature is its conflict resolution listing the conflicting lines vertically in the source file (like diff3 conflict markers but a GUI) instead of side-by-side panes.

https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff...

mistrial9• 2 years ago

regular meld user here .. just do not have KDE parts when it can be avoided -- not disagreeing otherwise.

chungy3• 2 years ago

My config:

    [alias]
            co = checkout
            ci = commit
            st = status
            br = branch
            hist = log --pretty=format:'%h %ad | %s%d [%an]' --graph --date=short
            type = cat-file -t
            dump = cat-file -p
            dft = difftool
    [tag]
            sort = version:refname
    [tar "tar.xz"]
            command = xz -c
    [tar "tar.zst"]
            command = zstd -T0 -c
    [log]
            date = iso-local
    [pull]
            ff = only
    [diff]
            tool = difftastic
    [difftool]
            prompt = false
    [difftool "difftastic"]
            cmd = difft "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
    [pager]
            difftool = true
    [safe]
            directory = *
    [advice]
            detachedHead = false
    [init]
            defaultBranch = master

xyst• 2 years ago

Not a fan of the “main” branch revolution?

Pretty good config though. Personally, I use diff configs depending on oss vs personal vs work. So I combine mine with “[includeIf gitdir:~/oss…]” …

Some companies like G have some weird requirements.

chungy3• 2 years ago

No, I'm not a fan of it. It's been master since forever and it's a perfectly good term, fits regular English convention of "master branch" too.

Personally, I use diff configs depending on oss vs personal vs work. So I combine mine with “[includeIf gitdir:~/oss…]” …

I'd stuff such things into the local repos' .git/config files instead of the global. It's rare that I do it, but sometimes I do work with projects with differing conventions.

imbnwa• 2 years ago

Not a fan of the “main” branch revolution?

Why not 'canon'?

wooptoo2• 2 years ago

Did you use Mercurial before? I miss its abbreviated commands. A few more from me:

  [alias]
    gr = grep -I
    ch = cherry-pick
    ls = ls-files
    tip = log -1 HEAD
    zip = archive -o latest.zip HEAD
    fix = commit --fixup

chungy3• 2 years ago

Never used Mercurial in any serious capacity. The abbreviations mostly stem from CVS and Subversion experience (and really glad I haven't touched either in many years).

ncann• 2 years ago

pull.ff only should have been the default option, or at least pull.rebase true. I've helped so many git newbie at work and this is probably the thing that caused the most confusion to people. The merge commit resulted from the default pull behavior caused nothing but pain.

globular-toast2• 2 years ago

The fundamental thing people fail to understand is the distributed nature of git. They don't understand that their master branch is not the same as your master branch, which isn't the same as GitHub's master branch etc. In fact, every time you clone you are also making a new branch!

The default behaviour of pull makes complete sense in the distributed system. It goes wrong when developers are also pushing to remotes and doing feature branches and the like. I love forges like GitHub, but I understood git first. Developers nowadays are using a decentralised version control tool to do centralised version control. No wonder it goes wrong.

xp843• 2 years ago

At the risk of angering all the vim-heads (this tip isn’t for anyone who likes vim or even emacs):

  editor = "nano -t"

This nano option is aka --saveonexit

Things accomplished:

- avoids using an overpowered modal editor that requires several keystrokes just to save and quit when done writing my couple of sentence commit message

- avoid even having to tell it I want to save. Of course I want to save. ^x - all done

(In the unlikely event you decide you want to abort the commit, just hit ^k a few times to kill the text and then ^x)

(Edit: Updated to the default exit keybinding which is ^x)

davidhaymond• 2 years ago

That's a nifty option! In (neo)vim, I like to use the ZZ keybinding to quickly save if modified and then quit. If I want to abort the commit, I'll type ZQ to discard changes and quit.

sodapopcan4• 2 years ago

Ya, it's somewhat surprising that ZZ isn't the binding that is burned into people's minds instead of :wq<cr>. I've even met regular vim users who don't know ZZ which, to be a bit hyperbolic, is mindboggling.

EDIT: And of course there is vim -y to make vim behave more like a "normal" editor than even nano :D (ie, you get ctrl-s and ctrl-q).

pxeger1• 2 years ago

Huh, I didn’t think of ZQ (to leave an empty commit message) to cancel the commit. I always use :cq (which exits vim with an error status)

samatman4• 2 years ago

No one's going to make you use vim, don't worry. But I don't find ^x vs jk:x compelling as a reason not to. Nor the difference between opening instantly (nano) vs. opening instantly (neovim). But I might :q! out of more commits than you do, who knows.

I used nano for about five years for git commits before I decided to embrace the Vim Way. No need to feel defensive about it, it's there for a reason.

xp843• 2 years ago

Somehow I knew there would be a half dozen members of the vim brotherhood out to defend it against a perceived lack of reverence for it.

<edited to remove pointless debate> To the rest of us, it boils down to "learn vim so you can prove you are a Real Hacker."

I acknowledge that knowing a thing I don't know (how to use vim to do anything useful) technically makes you smarter than me in the sense of 'possessing more knowledge about vim.' So, good for you. On the other hand, I don't accept that that knowledge is more useful than the knowledge of how to use literally any other good program that edits text. And I don't think anything should be that obtuse and seemingly intentionally non-obvious (onscreen visibility of important bindings or commands would aid in learning, and could be turned off by the true elite such as yourself, couldn't they?)

worksonmine3• 2 years ago

- avoids using an overpowered modal editor that requires several keystrokes just to save and quit when done writing my couple of sentence commit message

Funny, I find I do way less keystrokes in modal editors. I feel handicapped without. My patience runs out as soon as I have to use the arrows to fix something a few words back.

- avoid even having to tell it I want to save. Of course I want to save. ^x - all done

ZZ and ZQ isn't very difficult. And shift is usually easier on the pinky than ctrl.

You don't have to like vim, that's ok, but there's no need to exaggerate when comparing. When I was new I was so terrified of getting stuck in vim that I learned to use the `-m` option in all my commits. I still use it, but with vim keys even in my shell because it's so useful.

xp843• 2 years ago

Thanks for your reply. I wanted to clarify because of these 2 statements:

I do way less keystrokes in modal editors. I feel handicapped without. My patience runs out as soon as I have to use the arrows to fix something a few words back.

nano and micro do support lots of types of cursor movement (the same ^a and ^e emacs bindings that work across the mac os work fine, for instance. They also have word-forward and word-back) without resorting to hammering the arrow keys. And mouse support too, for the times when that makes more sense. And all of this without having modes, and with most of the bindings visible on screen (which there is more than enough room for in modern usage so I'm a big fan of that).

ZZ and ZQ isn't very difficult.

Keeping track of what mode you're in is the primary reason it doesn't speak to me, is all. I haven't met many people (anecdotal disclaimer!!) who actually use vim by choice, compared to how many young developers I've met who seem to have been told they have to use it when using the Terminal, so they subsequently wrote down "ESC, :wq" on a sticky note, and get flummoxed if they accidentally do something wrong because they have no idea how to use it. I saw these developers actually shying away from using things like git cli -- they became afraid of editing text in a terminal due to the unforgiving vim learning curve.*

Of course, I also agree you don't have to dislike vim and am glad your expertness with it makes you more productive. I've seen several developers who have mastered vim zipping around multiple documents and who knows what, with great efficiency. (While I don't feel like I'm missing anything by using a GUI app for such tasks, I'm still very impressed by those people!) I just want you to know I don't dislike vim completely irrationally :)

* As an example, this very thread has about 5 vim experts who didn't even know about your neat ZZ and ZQ trick! If lots of pros don't even use vim as effectively as it's designed to be used, what hope do new users have?

lobocinza3• 2 years ago

Sometimes I don't wan't to save. I may have second thoughts and want to change things before committing.

Izkata• 2 years ago

core.editor emacs: to use emacs (or another editor) to edit commit messages

I set EDITOR in my bashrc ages ago, so everything uses my chosen editor, including git. This git setting then overrides it if you use it.

edavis• 2 years ago

For the "I want to use different emails for different repos" issue, I've seen the `includeIf` technique but it felt fiddly. What I've done is set `user.useConfigOnly = true` and commented out `user.email` in ~/.gitconfig.

Now the first time I commit in a new repo, it errors out with "Author identity unknown" and I punch in "git config user.email ADDR" for the email I want to use and re-run the commit.

NewJazz6• 2 years ago

Huh. How many repos do you have? And how many emails? I have... A lot of repos. And two emails.

thfuran• 2 years ago

Two is still more than one, and it seems reasonable to, for example, keep work separate from personal stuff.

quectophoton2• 2 years ago

I also don't like the `includeIf`, but I ended up with a completely different way of doing things.

I just use different accounts depending on the context, usually by either SSH or by starting a Docker container with all the environment already configured.

At least for me, using different identities[1] when I want to use different identities[2], seems less brittle and less likely for my future self to accidentally forget to do something (e.g. change a config when I reinstall an OS).

[1]: OS user, directly (SSH) or indirectly (container).

[2]: Email address, username, etc.

Garbage• 2 years ago

During my consulting time, I had to do this a lot. So I wrote a blog post for myself on how to do this effectively - https://www.shirishpadalkar.com/using-separate-git-identitie...

JelteF3• 2 years ago

My personal favorite additions to my git config are using delta[1] as my pager for much more readable and syntax highlighted diffs. And adding the following alias, which means I no can always check out to the default branch of the repo, no matter if it's called master/main/develop/whatever

    [alias]
    checkout-default = "!git checkout $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref origin/HEAD | sed 's@^origin/@@')"

[1] https://github.com/dandavison/delta

wooptoo2• 2 years ago

A few more:

Change the comment character. This is useful when you want to include a hash in your commit message (e.g. for automatically linking to JIRA tickets).

  [core]
    commentChar = ";"

When starting a new branch/ticket you can create an empty commit where you write a detailed subject and description.

  [alias]
    newtask = commit --allow-empty

Create a zip archive of the current files.

  [alias]
    zip = archive -o latest.zip HEAD

Switch between the last two active branches with:

  git checkout -

Use short log lines:

  [format]
    pretty = format:%C(yellow)%h %Cblue%>(12)%ad %Cgreen%<(7)%aN%Cred%d %Creset%s

Some delta tweaks:

  [delta]
    features = decorations  # line numbers
    navigate = true  # use n and N to move between diff sections

And finally:

  [alias]
    praise = blame

twic2• 2 years ago

  remote.origin.tagOpt=--tags

Now, is there any way to set that for all remotes?

frontalier• 2 years ago

    remote.*.tagOpts=--tags

twic2• 2 years ago

Apparently not:

  fatal: bad config line 11 in file /home/twic/src/myproject/git/gitconfig

from-nibly2• 2 years ago

My favorite aliases (these scripts keep working and I wrote them YEARS ago so they might be optimize-able)

    [alias]
    fb = !fzf_prompt.sh                                                  # prompts the user with an fzf prompt to fuzzy search for branches
    cheese-touch = "log -n 1 --format=format:'%an' --"                   # displays who edited a file last
    destroy = "!git reset HEAD~1 && git add --all . && git reset --hard" # destroys top commit
    sc = "commit --amend --no-edit"                                      # *jackie chan's uncle voice* one more thing!
    pushf = "push --force-with-lease"                                    # *lego batman voice* first try!
    all = "!git add --all . && git status"                               # I forget that this doesn't exist on everyone's computer.
    cp = "cherry-pick"                                                   # this one feels obvious but that saves me so many letters


    ---fzf_prompt.sh---
    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    branch=$(git for-each-ref --shell --format='%(refname)' refs | cut -d/ -f3- | grep -Eo "[^']+" | fzf-tmux -d 15);
    if [[ ! -z "$branch" ]]; then
      if [[ $branch == origin/* ]]; then
        branch=$(echo $branch | cut -d/ -f2-)
      fi
      git checkout "$branch"
    fi

wlonkly2• 2 years ago

I have to ask -- why cheese-touch?

from-nibly2• 2 years ago

It's from the book diary of a wimpy kid. In the book there is some gross cheese on the street and someone is dared to touch it. Once they touch it they become an outcast, obtain the "cheese touch" and no one wants to talk to them. However once they touch someone else the "cheese touch" transfers to that someone else freeing the original person from being an outcast.

So cheese touch is the last person to touch that file. Every time someone touches the file the cheese touch transfers. And if that file broke the build or something you can find out who has the cheese touch on that file and t̶r̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶c̶a̶s̶t̶ ask them nicely if they know what's happening.

kentonv3• 2 years ago

IMO, git needs to change the default for merge.conflictstyle. The default "merge" style is abysmal, it does not give you enough information to correctly resolve conflicts in isolation -- you have to actually look up the changes separately to understand what each was doing. diff3 gives you sufficient information so you don't have to look up anything. I haven't tried the enhanced versions like kdiff3 or zdiff3 or whatever, it sounds like they may be marginally better, but the difference between the default and diff3 is night and day.

I've seen so many new engineers struggle for years not being able to figure out conflicts until someone tells them about diff3. The default here has likely wasted millions of dollars of productivity.

Too3• 2 years ago

Even better: Use a visual 3-way mergetool instead of working with the raw text.

If that’s too much for you, vscode renders the conflict similar to the raw representation but with pretty “accept mine” buttons next to it.

kentonv3• 2 years ago

Those merge tools typically take the raw conflict markers as input, and cannot give you as nice of a UI if they are two-way markers instead of 3-way. So you still want to change the default conflict style.

CodeIsTheEnd• 2 years ago

My favorite line in my .gitconfig is an alias that prints out the commit history as a tidy graph. (The default `git log --graph` uses 6 whole lines per commit!)

    [alias]
        lg = log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate --date=relative --format=format:'%C(bold blue)%h%C(reset) - %C(bold green)(%ar)%C(reset) %C(white)%s%C(reset) %C(dim white)- %an%C(reset)%C(bold yellow)%d%C(reset)' --all -n 15

Which I took from this Stack Overflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057564/pretty-git-branc...

divbzero• 2 years ago

I like how --all reveals forgotten refs.

mprime12• 2 years ago

Simplified version I can type from memory (I.e. on a system where I don’t have my gitconfig aliases):

  -—graph -—oneline -—color

szszrk• 2 years ago

You just gave me a lesson "why one should not just paste things he found online into his terminal". Your parameters have Em dash instead of a hyphen... I reinstalled git from dedicated official repositories before I realized my git is not old... the param is indeed incorrect.

ComputerGuru2• 2 years ago

In case you didn't know about it, `tig` does just that by default (and a whole lot more).

sandreas• 2 years ago

My git config:

  [alias]
    lg = log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate --date=format-local:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M' --format=format:'%C(bold blue)%h%C(reset) | %C(bold green)%ad%C(reset) %C(white)%s%C(reset) %C(dim white)- %an%C(reset)%C(bold yellow)%d%C(reset)' --all -n 15
    hist = log --pretty=format:\"%h %ad | %s%d [%an]\" --graph --decorate --date=short
    quick-push = "!f() { git add . && git commit -m \"$1\" && git push; }; f"
    search = lg -E -i --grep
  [user]
      email = xxx
      name = sandreas
  [core]
      ignorecase = false
      autocrlf = input
      excludesfile = ~/.gitignore_global
  [url "https://github.com/"]
          insteadOf = git@github.com:
  [url "ssh://git@github.com/sandreas/"]
      insteadOf = https://github.com/sandreas/
  [url "ssh://git@github.com/sandreas/"]
      insteadOf = git@github.com:sandreas/

The quick-push might be interesting. It calls a function `f`, which is defined before, to

  git add .
  git commmit -m "$1"
  git push

This can be used to define small git workflows as alias.

iraqmtpizza• 2 years ago

defaultBranch = slavemaster

has been getting a lot of traction; it helps us not shy away from what we did.

vbezhenar• 2 years ago

One git option that I almost never see in other people configs is

    [core]
      autocrlf = input
      safecrlf = true

It prevents commiting CRLF files and forces you to convert those to LF before commit (you can still override it with gitattributes if necessary). I hate CRLF so much that I spent lots of time digging out this combination of configuration values.

demurgos• 2 years ago

Oh that's great. I always used the following `.gitattributes`:

    # Enforce `lf` for text files (even on Windows)
    * text=auto eol=lf

I'll try your config too.

My current position is that anywhere you can choose between CRLF and LF (git, editor, program output), it should always be LF regardless of the platform. Simple LF just works on Windows, and removing this variation point simplifies so much of code. For example, you can check reproducible outputs or hashing with a single reference value.

amarshall• 2 years ago

branch.sort -committerdate, makes git branch sort by most recently used branches

No, it makes it sort by the committer date of the commit pointed to by the branch. Personally I find that to be of little use. To actually sort by recently used (i.e. switched-to), I wrote https://github.com/amarshall/git-recent-branches

nektro• 2 years ago

thanks! got 9 new ones from reading this :)

AntonCTO• 2 years ago

Some commands are used so often that it makes sense to further shorten them by placing them in `.bash_aliases` or a similar file for your favorite shell:

```

alias gs='git status'

alias gl='git log'

alias gd='git diff --color-words'

alias ga='git add'

alias gc='git commit'

```

chrisan• 2 years ago

I stole these from stackoverflow some time ago. Shows the branches with a bit more useful information

    [alias]
      # show a list of local git branches sorted by the commit date
      branches = "for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads --format='%(authordate:short) %(color:yellow)%(objectname:short) %(color:green)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) (%(color:cyan)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset)) %(authorname)'"

      # show a list of local and remote git branches sorted by the commit date
      branches-remote = "for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads refs/remotes --format='%(authordate:short) %(color:yellow)%(objectname:short) %(color:green)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) (%(color:cyan)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset)) %(authorname)'"

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