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Using Aliases to Speed Up Your Git Workflow

Robert Cooper on September 03, 2018

Leveraging aliases when working with git can help make you more efficient with using the popular version control system. Listed below are some of m...

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Ben Halpern • Sep 3 '18

This also acts as sort of a cheatsheet for things you might want to be doing in the first place, while giving a more compact command to do so.

Not everybody loves aliases, but this looks like a great guideline for those who do or want to start.

Robert Cooper • Sep 3 '18

Not everybody loves aliases

This is true. I worked with a guy that refused to use aliases because he thought he would forget the underlying command behind the alias.

Jon Bristow • Sep 3 '18 • Edited

It’s less that and more having your muscle memory be completely wrong as soon as you ssh somewhere.

Aliases are ok... but anyone with a bloated vimrc file can tell you how strange it feels to use the defaults. (Seriously, using vim-surround is basically the main reason I still use vim)

EDIT: and typing git commands are a very small part of my workflow, so it seems wasteful to alias them. And I will absolutely never add -A... I’m too paranoid about committing something I didn’t mean to.

Oliver • Sep 3 '18

I don't have many aliases for git commands but seeing git add -A has inspired me to add one more to my small list:

alias gip='git add ${FILE} -p'

As in: git add file.rb -p. The -p flag tells git that you want to select which individual lines/hunks get committed. It's the scalpel to -A's mallet.

The alias allows me to do it this way: gip file.rb

Jon Bristow • Sep 3 '18

SInce i work in feature branches that get squash merged in a few days, I don’t really understand why you would be doing more than one thing at once...

Jesse Phillips • Jan 5 '19

I don't think squash merge should exist. The commit message sucks, many times your feature can be good individual changes (valuable outside the feature) it is pretty easy to finalize the order and squash with a rebase --interactive.

I'm said --fixup isn't listed as as alias.

Alain Van Hout • Sep 3 '18

My general opinion is very much 'use whatever works best for you'.

For me personally though, aliases like this are equivalent to improving the speed/performance of your car by speeding up how quickly you can get into and out of the car.

aurel kurtula • Sep 3 '18

Haha, that's why I bookmarked it. Apart from add, commit -a -m, push --all and branching I do nothing else. And that I think is powerful, I only imagine how much power I'd get if I could be bothered learning the rest.

K • Sep 3 '18

My favorites are:

alias whelp="git reset --hard"
alias weekend="git push --force"

Elliot Derhay • Sep 3 '18

Both funny examples. My favorite (when needed) is git rip-history (force-push).

Other than that, I only have a couple that are useful for my workflow.

One that I haven't seen elsewhere is this:
git email (git config --global user.email).

Also, I realized while typing this that yours were bash aliases like above. I still haven't made the transition from git aliases...

Chad Windham • Sep 3 '18

Oh wow. You made WAY more than me. I did this a while back, my aliases are;

push (git push),
pull (git pull),
add (git add *),
commit (git commit -m),
check (git checkout),
branch (git branch)

That's about all I ever use/felt comfortable aliasing. I also didn't go to the same level of abbreviation as you. But I enjoyed your list, was fun to see how somebody else chose to implement the same idea.

Sergiu Mureşan • Sep 3 '18

Thank you for an in-depth list of common git commands. If I weren't on Windows I might be using some of them. (gl especially)

Using aliases is fine for the most part. Just so that people don't jump directly into using them, here are some downsides to this:

You won't remember what each command does if you end up with too many too complex
They work only on your own machine... I wouldn't want to waste time googling git commands when helping one of my colleagues :/
If you use git extensively you might end up adding an alias for most parameters thus getting you lost in a sea of aliases

Overall, I think you should try it for the most used commands (like status, commit and pull), it definitely saves up some time.

Robert Cooper • Sep 3 '18

You can use aliases on Windows? That surprises me.

Sergiu Mureşan • Sep 3 '18

Apparently, you can.

I use git aliases and they are good enough for me... I just don't want to deal with batch... shivers

Martin Riedel • Sep 3 '18

Interesting list of aliases you have - some are similar and some quite different than mine. I tried so stick with a two-character rule though.

you could try to use capitalisation to further shorten the necessary keystrokes a bit.
For example i use ga for git add <file> and gA for git add --all.

Robert Cooper • Sep 3 '18

Nice, I like that

Thomas Landin • Sep 3 '18

I rely on git aliases rather than shell aliases, and I try not to go overboard with the amount of aliases either.

I use YADM to manage my dotfiles and since it wraps git it will automatically pick up on git aliases, e.g yadm alias is the same as git alias, but I couldn't do yadm zsh-alias.

Shortening some commands is highly useful if I do them a lot, but if I write a bunch of aliases for nearly everything I've replaced learning git commands with learning git aliases. It's increasing my mental workload instead of easing it because I have to memorize the alias and what it stands for.

I also have to use other VCS sometimes, and by retaining the git prefix on git commands I find it's easier to remember what is what since terminology is similar but not identical between VCS.

Robert Cooper • Sep 3 '18

I haven't heard of YADM before you mentioned it. I will look into it since I don't have a solution to manage all of my dotfiles yet.

Thomas Landin • Sep 3 '18

There's a whole bunch of options in that space, but I prefer the simplicity and straightforwardness of YADM. It's basically just a wrapper around git allowing you to track files without making an actual repository, i.e. it only cares about files you manually add to it so a yadm status won't list dozens of unrelated files and folders.

It also imposes no restrictions on folder structure etc.

David Cantrell • Sep 6 '18 • Edited

The one that I use a lot (I've got it as a shell script rather than as an alias or function) is ...

#!/bin/bash
SOURCE=$1
NUM=$2

if [ "$SOURCE" == "-h" -o "$SOURCE" == "" ]; then
    echo
    echo Usage: pick-many-cherries SOURCE COUNT
    echo
    echo Cherry-pick the last COUNT commits from SOURCE in chronological order.
    echo There is NO ERROR CHECKING.
    echo
    exit
fi

for i in {% raw %}`git log $SOURCE |grep ^commit |head -$NUM |awk '{print $2}' |tac`{% endraw %}; do git cherry-pick $i;done

Mario Peshev • Feb 9 '19

Just stumbled upon this one -- great job!

I've been using similar aliases over the past few years. Here's what works for me (someone may relate and adapt accordingly):

gadd (git add)
gommit (git commit -m)
gista (git status)
gullom (git pull origin master)
gushom (git push origin master)
gullod (git pull origin develop)
gushod (git push origin develop)
gibra (git branch)

Jan van Brügge • Sep 3 '18

I wouldnt use bash aliases for the commands, just for git itself. That way you keep tab completion on the aliases.
For example:
g l = g log --pretty=oneline --graph
g caa = g commit -a --amend
The g is a normal bash alias

Robert Cooper • Sep 3 '18

Tab completion still works for me when I use zsh aliases.

Adrian B.G. • Sep 3 '18

Definately you are not a lot or not at all productive with aliases, if the commands are small and used rarely, like the git is.
Plus the cognitive load is bigger, because u still have to learn the underline commands when u need more custom params, so is only a new layer of complexity in your head.

You can save 10s per day with alises and waste 1h for a debuging that could be avoided.

I use a limited amount of aliases but I removed my own and switched to a popular framework called github.com/Bash-it/bash-it

Martin Schwarzer • Sep 3 '18 • Edited

Doesn't aliasing break tab-complete? I don't always remember the branches of the projects and how I called them, so I sometimes really do have to rely on git telling me.

Robert Cooper • Sep 3 '18

Tab completion still works for me! For example I can use gco (for git checkout) and start typing a branch name and then use tab completion to find the branch i'm looking for.