Got any neat Git tips?

[csswizardry]

As per my Git article, does anyone have any useful snippets they’d like to share?

[matijs]

Undo changes to one (or more) file(s) in a commit instead of reverting the entire commit:

git show commit-hash -- path/to/file.html | git apply --reverse

[astorije]

Great article, @csswizardry!

---

Working copy cleanup

Deleting local branches that have been merged and deleted:

git branch --merged | grep -v \"^\\s*master$\" | grep -v \"\\*\" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d

I aliased it as delete-merged and since I use it daily, also as dm.

I always use this in conjunction with the following (aliased as pru) which deletes all stale remote-tracking branches (assuming your upstream is called origin, which is almost always in my personal case):

git remote prune origin

[astorije]

Context switching

I have several projects for work and several open source projects I work on during my personal time. To deal with this and make sure I use the correct email address + correct signing key, I use the following:

1. Set up user.name only (no email) and force git to refuse a commit without an email address set up
2. Enable GPG signing
3. Set up "profiles"
4. After cloning a repo, switch to correct profile (here with git perso or git cht)

It probably seems convoluted but it has worked well for me in the past. I'm sure they could be (or there is?) a plugin doing that out there, just never looked for it, and this is actually simple enough.

[astorije]

Branch naming convention

I like to have my branches named as astorije/my-branch so it's easy to spot in GitHub's branch list and in the command line. It's a nice convention often met in open source projects, and I even managed to convince my entire team to adopt it 🎉.

But I really don't want to type 8 extra characters when creating a branch, so I set up this alias:

cb = "!f() { git checkout -b astorije/$@; }; f"

Now I just need to type git cb my-branch to create astorije/my-branch 😅.

[MarioSo]

two of my favorite git aliases are:

List all Submodules
alias gsub="grep path .gitmodules | sed 's/.*= //'"

List Tags in a usefull way
alias gt="git tag -l --sort=v:refname | tail -n8"

[remy]

Best git tip I saw shared on twitter was the :/ filter for latest match. i.e. git log :/"fix: font" will show latest commit matching the text fix: font.

[astorije]

What am I about to commit?

git config --global alias.staged 'diff --staged'

Then run git staged before committing to double-check what's in the index.

---

Do not stash what is staged

git stash --keep-index will stash everything that has not been git added yet (when interactively adding stuff to the stage).

---

Select what must be staged

I have aliased ap to git add -p and have never used git add . since then. Always pick what you are adding to the stage, and never commit something unwanted by inattention.

[chutten]

-p is my favourite flag.

git checkout -p HEAD~ will let you pick and choose which hunks you want to unstage from the present commit in case you didn't mean that -a on your last git commit

git log -p -- path/to/file gives the diffs made to the file inline with the log messages. Good for fuzzy text searches.

git add -p allows you to choose what changes you want to add. Make two commits' worth of changes in one file? This lets you interactively chose which of those should be added at the moment. Check the s (split) and e (edit) flags for if one "chunk" has elements of both.

(( BONUS ROUND: If you haven't used git rebase -i to reorganize and squash local changes, you're missing out ))

[astorije]

-p is my favourite flag.

Yep, me too, and it even works with git stash :D

[pedrorijo91]

I have 2 aliases that I use all the time:

• my custom one liner log: l1 = log --format='%Cgreen %h %C(white) %G? %Cred%ai %C(bold)%<(15)%ar %Creset %C(cyan)%<(30)%ae %C(yellow) %s'
• alias to commit work in progress (useful for end of the day, but feature still not complete). cwip = commit -S -m ':construction: WIP'. Note that it will still open the git commit message editor to fill in the details

[msankhala]

I use this to fetch pull request by id to local branch.
git fetch origin pull/<id>/head:<branch-name>

There are lots of git tips on this repo https://github.com/git-tips/tips
There is npm package to show git tip each time you open a new terminal. https://github.com/nirajpandkar/git-tip

[rafaelrinaldi]

I recently put together a way to find (with fuzzy search) and list branches interactively. Check it out.

[Boldewyn]

In one repository I need to check in JS/CSS compilation results next to the source files. To get an idea of the changes in those compiled files I use this alias:

wdiff = diff -w --word-diff-regex=. --color-words -U0

It configures git-diff to produce the absolutely most minimal diff possible.

[ford-prefect]

git rebase -i --autosquash --autostash

Really handy in projects that don't do merge commits (read, everything I work with).

git reflog

Lost a commit in a rebase? Did a pull and want to go back to a previous state? git reflog gives you the hash corresponding to the last several values of HEAD so you can examine and checkout the point that you're interested in.