Git Alias: Make Your Git Experience Simpler, Easier, Faster and Clean

An alias, or a shortcut, allows us to replace a long or less memorable command with a simple one. In this post, I will talk about Git aliases.

If you use Git on the terminal or command-line, And you don't want to type the entire text of each of the Git commands, you can set up an alias for each command using git config. For example, you may want to set up:

$ git config --global alias.st status

Now instead of typing git status, you just need to type git st to check the status of your Git repository. Here are a couple of more examples you may want to set up:

$ git config --global alias.a add
$ git config --global alias.b branch
$ git config --global alias.c commit
$ git config --global alias.co checkout
$ git config --global alias.cob checkout -b

Another way of adding git aliases is to add it in ~/.gitconfig file. Just open the file with your favorite text editor and add aliases like:

[alias]
    st = status
    a = add
    b = branch
    c = commit
    co = checkout
    cob = checkout -b

Creating a Git alias can also be very useful in creating commands that are missing in Git and that you think should exist. For example, while unstaging a file, you can add your own unstage alias to Git:

$ git config --global alias.unstage 'reset HEAD --'

This makes the following two commands equivalent:

$ git unstage fileA
$ git reset HEAD -- fileA

Obviously, it looks more clean and clearer to use the  git unstage  command than the  git reset HEAD --.

Git alias is not limited for the Git provided commands only. You can also run any external command by adding  !  character at the beginning of it. This is useful when you write your own commands that work with a Git repository. For example, we can make an alias git ui to run gitk or sourcetree :

$ git config --global alias.ui '!gitk'
$ git config --global alias.ui '!sourcetree'

Very much simple! Isn't it?

So far, I have talked about global Git aliases. But you can add repo specific Git aliases too. They are useful to override the global aliases. To add repo specific alias, edit the .git/config file in the repo where you want to add the alias, and follow the same syntax. You can also add them using git config without the --global flag.

That's it for now. Add aliases to your Git repositories as you need them to make your Git experience simpler, easier, faster and clean. I hope you'll find it very useful in your daily Git usages.

Attribution:

Pro Git Book - https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Git-Aliases