I generally do all my work with git on the command line — sometimes I do commits in my IDE but all my pushes, pulls, merges, and looking at history is done on the command line.
First off, I have a command prompt that tells me what branch I’m in. I use zsh but you should be able to find a similar one if you use bash. I will warn you that it’s really slow in Cygwin but in “pure” Unix systems like OSX and Ubuntu it works fine.
After that, I really only have 4 magic git commands:
alias gss='git status --short'
alias gl='git smart-log'
alias gm='git smart-merge'
alias gup='git smart-pull'The git smart-* commands are from the git-smart Ruby gem. You can read all about it here. These commands have helped me become more productive and save me so much time.
My gss command is one that I run the most often. It’s my default look into what has changed locally. It’s a quick view, and it tells me what I need, short and sweet:
I use gl as my lifesaver on what has changed and when. My favorite part is how it tells you what was committed in each branch and the life-cycle of branches. And you can easily see when branching and merging went really, really wrong.
Yes, that’s a real log from a real git project I was in a long time ago. And, yes, it was my fault.
Another great thing about gl is that it tells you what remote that was pushed to. So if you have deployed something and can’t figure out why you don’t see the changes, then it’s easy to see if you forgot to push your changes. This has saved my sanity many time.
gm is a magic little command that does a lot of heavy lifting:
master. Non-fast forward is important because it logs where the merge was.gup is similar, only it tries to pull from the tracking branch. It does the stash as well, if necessary. If all else fails, it will try a rebase to make the merge, which doesn’t happen often (and, to me, is a sign that something went seriously wrong).
So, there are some every day tricks that I use to make my work with git a lot easier.
During the first week of June, I had the opportunity to speak and attend Gr8Conf EU in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference was relatively small but had many amazingly talented speakers and attendees. Just check the agenda and you’ll see many of the…
Mike has almost 20 years of experience in technology. He started in networking and Unix administration, and grew into technical support and QA testing. But he has always done some development on the side and decided a few years ago to pursue it full-time. His history of working with users gives Mike a unique perspective on writing software.
