When I was first starting out in software engineering, it felt like there was a never-ending barrage of tooling to learn. After more than a decade in CLI environments, I still find myself constantly learning new features and fun facts - but it’s fairly rare that I learn something new that I end up using day-to-day.
I wanted to share some things I learned at relatively late stages in the game that ended up being significant productivity boosters for me - perhaps some of them are well-known, but in the spirit of this XCKD, I hope that someone reading this might pick up something new.
You can use
-
everywhere you can use a ref in a git command. I very often usegit checkout master git pull git checkout - git merge -
(Of course that’s all aliased and I have other flags in there too, but that’s the gist)
Same for
cd -
. Nice if you want to go to/etc/blah
, and then back to where you were.You can also use
pushd
andpopd
which will push and pop directories from a stack, if you need to do something more complex.Also, if you want to switch faster between branches, slap this in your
~/.gitconfig
under[alias]
:co = !git checkout $(git for-each-ref refs/heads/ --format='%(refname:short)' | fzf)
Presuming you’ve got
fzf
installed, you can nowgit co
(co = checkout) to get a menu with fuzzy find capabilities to switch between branches. Nice if branch names are long/similar/only-different-at-the-end.fzf
is dope.I have fzf-git for all of that, but honestly I don’t ever use it, as I’m hardly ever switching between branches and tab complete is enough for me in most cases.
### # FZF GIT ### # Deciphered from fzf-file-widget. Somewhat unclear why it doesn't exist already! function fzf_add_to_commandline -d 'add stdin to the command line, for fzf functions' #git checkout $1 read -l result commandline -t "" commandline -it -- (string escape $result) commandline -f repaint end function fzf_checkout -d "git checkout" read -l result git checkout $result end # https://gist.github.com/aluxian/9c6f97557b7971c32fdff2f2b1da8209 function __git_fzf_is_in_git_repo command -s -q git and git rev-parse HEAD >/dev/null 2>&1 end function __git_fzf_git_status __git_fzf_is_in_git_repo; or return git -c color.status=always status --short | \ fzf -m --ansi --preview 'git diff --color=always HEAD -- {-1} | head -500' | \ cut -c4- | \ sed 's/.* -> //' | \ fzf_add_to_commandline commandline -f repaint end function __git_fzf_git_branch __git_fzf_is_in_git_repo; or return git branch -a --color=always | \ grep -v '/HEAD\s' | \ fzf -m --ansi --preview-window right:70% --preview 'git log --color=always --oneline --graph --date=short \ --pretty="format:%C(auto)%cd %h%d %s %C(magenta)[%an]%Creset" \ --print0 \ --read0 \ (echo {} | sed s/^..// | cut -d" " -f1) | head -'$LINES | \ sed 's/^..//' | cut -d' ' -f1 | \ sed 's#^remotes/##' | \ # fzf_add_to_commandline | \ fzf_checkout end function __git_fzf_git_tag __git_fzf_is_in_git_repo; or return git tag --sort -version:refname | \ fzf -m --ansi --preview-window right:70% --preview 'git show --color=always {} | head -'$LINES | \ fzf_add_to_commandline end function __git_fzf_git_log __git_fzf_is_in_git_repo; or return git log --color=always --graph --date=short --format="%C(auto)%cd %h%d %s %C(magenta)[%an]%Creset" | \ fzf -m --ansi --reverse --preview 'git show --color=always (echo {} | grep -o "[a-f0-9]\{7,\}") | head -'$LINES | \ sed -E 's/.*([a-f0-9]{7,}).*/\1/' | \ fzf_add_to_commandline end # https://gist.github.com/junegunn/8b572b8d4b5eddd8b85e5f4d40f17236 function git_fzf_key_bindings -d "Set custom key bindings for git+fzf" bind \ca\cs __git_fzf_git_status bind \ca\cf __git_fzf_git_branch bind \ca\ct __git_fzf_git_tag bind \ca\cl __git_fzf_git_log end git_fzf_key_bindings