git-extra-commands

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Table of Contents

• Included Scripts
• Useful git aliases
• Installing
  • Pre-requisites
  • Zgenom
  • Antigen
  • oh-my-zsh
  • Bash / Manual Installation
• Other useful git stuff
  • Articles / Blog posts / Books
  • External Git Utilities
• Miscellaneous Tips
  • Make it easier to check out default branch
  • Have git cope with typos
  • Rewrite git:// with https://
  • or replace with ssh
• Contributing
• Thanks

git-extra-commands is a ZSH plugin that packages some extra git helper scripts I've found. This collection (and the scripts that I wrote in it) is licensed with the Apache Version 2 license.

This collection doesn't actually require ZSH, but packaging it as a ZSH plugin makes it more convenient for people using a ZSH framework to use this collection.

Some of the scripts in this collection came from other sources and may have different licensing - if they do, their license information is included inline in the script source.

If you wrote one of these scripts and want it removed from this collection, please either make a PR and/or file an issue against the repository and I will remove it.

Included Scripts

Useful git aliases

Here are some helpful aliases for your ~/.gitconfig

Installing

Pre-requisites

• A relatively recent version of git. The version of git Apple includes in macOS is very stale. You should really brew install git to get the current version if you're on macOS - if not for features, for security updates.
• Python 3+
• Ruby 2.2+

Zgenom

If you're using Zgenom:

1. Add zgenom load unixorn/git-extra-commands to your .zshrc along with your other zgenom load commands.
2. zgenom reset && zgenom save

Antigen

If you're using Antigen:

1. Add antigen bundle unixorn/git-extra-commands@main to your .zshrc where you've listed your other plugins.
2. Close and reopen your Terminal/iTerm window to refresh context and use the plugin. Alternatively, you can run antigen bundle unixorn/git-extra-commands in a running shell to have antigen load the new plugin.

oh-my-zsh

If you're using oh-my-zsh:

1. Clone the repository into a new git-extra-commands directory in oh-my-zsh's plugin folder:

git clone https://github.com/unixorn/git-extra-commands.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/git-extra-commands

2. Edit your ~/.zshrc and add git-extra-commands – same as clone directory – to the list of plugins to enable:

plugins=( ... git-extra-commands )

3. Then, restart your terminal application to refresh context and use the plugin. Alternatively, you can source your current shell configuration:

source ~/.zshrc

Bash / Manual Installation

Nothing here actually requires you to use ZSH or zgen, that's just a convenient distribution method for anyone using a ZSH framework.

If you aren't using any ZSH frameworks, or if you're using bash, fish or another shell, do the following steps:

1. git clone this repository
2. Add /path/to/git-extra-commands/bin to your $PATH in your shell's startup files.

Other useful git stuff

Articles / Blog posts / Books

• “Git” it together: Some tips on commit etiquette and best practices for junior developers is a good article explaining some best practices on how to write a good commit message, no matter what source control system you're using.
• 4 Branching Workflows for git by Patrick Porto discusses the pros and cons of four of the more popular git workflows.
• 5 types of Git workflows that will help you deliver better code explains five different Git workflows and the way they tackle various aspects of code collaboration: introducing changes, solving conflicts, using branches, and more.
• A Git Walkthrough by Zach Dennis is a great blog post
• A Grab Bag of Git Tricks by Leah Neukirchen is a great blog post on git that is the source for several scripts in this collection.
• A Guide to GIT using spatial analogies - Some developers find git takes a little getting used to, claiming that it is conceptually convoluted compared to other distributed version control systems. Here are a couple of simple spatial analogies to help become proficient and fluent in using git's command-line interface.
• A Thorough Introduction to Git's Interactive Patch Mode is an introduction on how to stage just parts of your changes to a commit.
• A Tidy, Linear Git History by Marcus Geelnard is a blog post about the value of a linear commit history.
• awesome-github - Faraz Fallahi maintains a curated list of GitHub & Git resources.
• Conditional .gitconfig by Marcus Crane explains how to have different .gitconfig settings based on where the checkout is located. This makes it easy to have a work directory with work settings applied to all repositories in it, and a personal one with different settings.
• Fixing commits with git commit --fixup and git rebase --autosquash - Jordan wrote a good summary of how to use fixup commits in your workflow.
• Fuzzy Finding in Bash with fzf is a great article about using fzf with some git helper scripts.
• Fuzzy Git Checkout by Mark Nielsen explains how to use fzf for git checkouts.
• Git Config - Instructions for using directory-specific git configurations. Automatically switching email addresses based on what directory a git repository is in.
• Git Exercises is a great blog post by Julia Evans. She also covers some other miscellaneous git facts in her Some Miscellaneous git facts post.
• git flight rules by Kate Hudson is a collection of useful git usage tips.
• Git From the Inside Out explains how git works, focusing on the graph structure underpinnings of git and how they affect its behavior.
• Git Log Customization - Good tutorial about customizing the format of git log.
• Git Rebase in Depth is a good tutorial on git rebase that covers the common use cases for rebasing.
• Git Rebase: What Can Go Wrong - Another good explanation by Julia Evans.
• Git Spelunking with Bisect - A brief introduction to git bisect.
• Git Submodules Revisted is a good article by Dave Cridland on using submodules in your code.
• git-tips by Mislav Marohnić is a good article on git tips. Several of his git scripts are in this collection.
• git-tips/tips is a collection of git tips.
• git, the simple guide by Roger Dudler is a good introduction to git.
• GitHub Cheat Sheet is an excellent collection of tips and aliases maintained by Tim Green.
• gitimmersion.com/ is a guided tour that walks through the fundamentals of Git, inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it.
• How Core Git Developers Configure Git - What git config settings should be defaults by now? Here are some settings that even the core developers change.
• How Does Git Work? - A basic introduction to git.
• How I configure my Git identities - How to use includeif to (among other tricks) automatically change what email is credited as author depending on what git repository you're working on.
• How to Review a Merge Commit is a good article on dealing with reviewing the changes made during a merge.
• Ignoring bulk change commits with git blame - Shows how to ignore certain commits in your repository in git blame output. Very useful for ignoring commits with large changes created by automated tools like black.
• Introduction to git on learnxinyminutes.com is a quick intro.
• Learn Git Branching is the most visual and interactive way to learn git on the web; you'll be challenged with exciting levels, given step-by-step demonstrations of powerful features, and maybe even have a bit of fun along the way.
• learnenough.com has a more detailed git tutorial on
• More Productive Git by James Turnbull is a quick tutorial for beginning git users.
• Oh Shit, Git! has a collection of bad situations explained in plain English and how to get yourself out of them . When you manage to get your git working directory in a sad state, you can run into the chicken-egg problem where if you just knew what command to man, you could dig yourself out of the hole, but if you knew that, you wouldn't be in the bad place anyway.
• Platform Specific Gitconfigs and the Wonderful includeif by Mike Mackintosh explains how to have different gitconfig settings based on what platform you're on or what directory you're in. Makes it easier to have personal and work repos on the same machine.
• Pro Git by Scott Chacon is a great resource for getting more out of git.
• So You Think You Know Git? - Scott Chacon's FOSDEM 2024 talk on Git Tips and Tricks.
• The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code - Five git commands that tell you where a codebase hurts before you open a single file. Churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, and crisis patterns.
• The Git Pickaxe explains how you can use the git pickaxe to search easily for strings in commit messages - write good commit messages and it'll be easier to find the commits that actually implement changes.
• Top ten pull request review mistakes is a great article by Scott Nonnenberg on how to do better code reviews on PRs.
• Tracing the evolution of a Python function with git log - Nice tutorial on making git log output more useful when you're only interested in the changes in a specific function.
• Tracking diffs by scoping to file, range, function, method, or class changes in Git is a great article by Susan Potter about making git show file-specific diffs, or even function-specific diffs in a language-aware way.

External Git Utilities

• bfg repo-cleaner - Removes large or troublesome blobs like git filter-branch does, but faster.
• bitbucket-git-helpers - Helper scripts to allow you to create bitbucket PRs from a shell session.
• blackbox - Tom Limoncelli open sourced the tool they use at Stack Exchange to use GPG to store secrets in a git repository.
• branch-manager - ZSH plugin for branch management
• commit-helper - A python script that helps you write commits following commit conventions.
• diff-so-fancy - Better looking git diffs.
• dunk - Another tool for prettier git diffs.
• fzf-git-worktree - Manage git worktrees with fzf integration.
• gh-dash - A rich terminal UI for GitHub that doesn't break your flow
• ghq-worktree - A ZSH plugin that integrates ghq, fzf, and git worktree to minimize context-switching cost in multi-repository development.
• gig - a CLI .gitignore generator
• git ZSH plugin - A replacement for the stock oh-my-zsh git plugin. Provides quite a few useful aliases and functions that are more consistent in their naming that the relatively unintuitive ones in the stock plugin.
• git_history_visualizer - python script to visualize the history of files in a git repository
• git-absorb - Essentially, when your working directory has uncommitted changes on top of draft changesets, you can run git absorb and the uncommitted modifications are automagically folded ("absorbed") into the appropriate draft ancestor commits. The command essentially looks at the lines that were modified, finds a commit modifying those lines, and amends that commit to include your uncommitted changes. If the changes can't be made without conflicts, they remain uncommitted. This workflow is insanely useful for things like applying review feedback.
• git-activity - Displays an activity graph (like the contribution graph on GitHub) for the current git repository and branch.
• git-aliases.zsh - Peter Hurford's git plugin which you may prefer to the git plugin from oh-my-zsh.
• git-also - Shows what files are most often committed with a given file in the repository.
• git-amend - Bash script to amend older commits with staged changes.
• git-branch-status - A git utility to make managing large number of branches either across many remotes easier. Branch status allows comparing all branches against their upstream or any arbitrary branch to show the number of commit differences.
• git-branches - Prints the commit behind/ahead counts for branches.
• git-bump - Hook scripts to automatically bump the version file in a repository
• git-chart - A python script that builds charts from a git repository
• git-cl - SVN-style changelists for Git. Organise files by intent, commit by changelist, create branches from changelists.
• git-clean-branch - Cleans up dead git branches.
• git-cleanbranches - A powerful unified clean up tool for git branches that uses fzf to find all branches that are safe to delete.
• git-cliff - git-cliff can generate changelog files from the Git history by utilizing conventional commits as well as regex-powered custom parsers. The changelog template can be customized with a configuration file to match the desired format.
• git-complete-urls - ZSH plugin to enhance git tab completion to include in the remotes completion (e.g. from git clone) any URL in the clipboard.
• git-crypt - Enables transparent encryption and decryption of files in a git repository. Files which you choose to protect are encrypted when committed, and decrypted when checked out.
• git-delete-merged-branches - A convenient command-line tool helping you keep repositories clean. Supports pruning squash merges and other more complex scenarios than the script in this repository does.
• git-deploy-s3 - Keeps your git repository's assets in sync with Amazon S3.
• git-diffall - Provides a directory based diff mechanism for git.
• git-extend - Extend git builtins with command wrappers.
• git-fastclone - Think git clone --recursive on steroids. If you're doing repeated checkouts of a given repository on a machine (like a ci box), git-fastclone will speed things up considerably.
• git-flow-completion - Bash, Fish and ZSH completion support for git-flow
• git-follow - Follow lifetime changes of a pathspec.
• git-fuzzy - A CLI interface to git that relies heavily on fzf.
• git-graph - creates a Graphviz graph showing the high-level structure of a repository's history.
• git-gutter - Plugin for Sublime Text 2/3 to display the git diff in the edit window gutter.
• git-it-on.zsh - Another plugin by Peter Hurford that adds a gitit command that will open your current directory on github, in your current branch. Also works with private GitHub servers.
• git-lint - Enforces git rebase workflow with consistent commits for a clean and easy to read/debug project history.
• git-profile - Manage multiple git accounts in ZSH by auto-switching user.name, user.email, and signing keys based on directory path or repository remote URL. Never push a commit under the wrong identity again.
• git-prompt-kit - A configurable set of components for creating feature rich, high performance Git-aware zsh prompts (aka themes) with minimal coding.
• git-quick-stats - A simple and efficient way to access various statistics in a git repository.
• git-repo-updater - Allows you to easily update multiple git repositories at once.
• git-secrets - Prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories.
• git-standup - Recall what you did on the last working day. Can work in a directory full of git repositories to see a consolidated view of all work in all the repositories.
• git-stashd - Autostashing daemon for dirty worktrees.
• git-submodule-tools - A collection of scripts that should help make life with git submodules easier.
• git-sweep - A utility script to remove branches that have been merged to master.
• git-to-jj - A ZSH plugin that helps you progressively learn Jujutsu (aka jj) porcelain as you use git commands.
• git-todo - helper script to show all the todo entries in your repository.
• git-up (gem) - Fetch and rebase all locally-tracked remote branches.
• git-up (python) - Python implementation of Aanand's original ruby gem
• git-user-switch - ZSH plugin that lets you switch between multiple GitHub user accounts. It automatically updates both your SSH configuration and GitHub CLI (gh) authentication.
• git-wayback-machine - A simple script to quickly navigate a project's state through it's git history
• git-worktree (alexiszamanidis) - Wraps some git worktree operations for simplicity and productivity. Includes fzf tooling.
• git-worktree (trthomps) - Enhanced git worktree management with bare repository support. This plugin provides convenient commands for working with git worktrees, making it easy to work on multiple branches simultaneously.
• gitgo - Open a GitHub/Gitlab hosted repository in your browser via the command-line (macOS only).
• gitql - Gitql is a git query language.
• gitsh - An interactive shell for git. From within gitsh you can issue any git command, even using your local aliases and configuration.
• gitspace - Bind a git identity to a directory. The wrong account fails loudly instead of signing a commit quietly.
• gitty - Single-binary CLI for Git and GitHub with short, human-readable commands. gitty up stages, commits, and pushes in one step.
• gunstage - There are at least eight ways to unstage files in a git repository. This is a command-line shell plugin for undoing git add.
• hitch - Allows developers to be properly credited when Pair Programming and using git.
• hub - A command-line tool that wraps git in order to extend it with extra features and commands that make working with GitHub easier.
• igit - Interactively construct git commands using fzf.
• joe - Generates .gitignore files from the command-line for you.
• mergepbx - Helper script for merging XCode project files.
• more-hooks-for-git - Adds extra hooks for git add, git diff and git status.
• relnote - Offline stdlib Python CLI and GitHub Action for conventional-commit release notes with no API and no config.
• switch-git - Easy switching between git repositories. Just type sgr <some part of you repo's name>, press enter and you're there.
• ugit - Lets you undo your last git operation.
• worktree - Adds functions that wrap git worktree.
• xcode-build-scripts - Helper scripts to use with XCode projects.

Miscellaneous Tips

Make it easier to check out default branch

Many repositories are switching away from using master as the default branch name. You can do git config --global alias.co-default '!'"git checkout \$(git branch -r | awk -F/ '/HEAD/ {print \$NF}')" to add a co-default alias that will determine what the repository's default branch is for you.

Alternatively, add the following aliases from a tweet by @jnesselr to your .gitconfig file:

cdef = "!git checkout $(git originhead)"
originhead = "!git remote show origin | grep 'HEAD branch' | cut -d ' ' -f5"

This queries the remote to get the current up to date default branch, so it will work even if the remote's default branch changes after you did your initial checkout.

Have git cope with typos

Do git config --global help.autocorrect 1

git will now try to figure out what you meant, for example:

$ git commt
WARNING: You called a Git command named 'commt', which does not exist.
Continuing in 0.1 seconds, assuming that you meant 'commit'.

Rewrite git:// with https://

git config --global url."https://github".insteadOf git://github

or replace with ssh

Use ssh instead of https://

git config --global url."git@github.com:".insteadOf "https://github.com/"

Credit: @grawity & @hansdg1 by way of @Kovrinic's gist

Contributing

• Please include an entry both in the credits section of README.md for any scripts and a credit comment in the script itself in your PRs so authors get their work credited correctly.
• Please use #!/usr/bin/env interpreter instead of a direct path to the interpreter, this makes it easier for people to use more recent versions when the ones packaged with their OS (macOS and CentOS, I'm looking at you!) are stale.

Thanks

Many thanks to all the contributors over the years.

Made with contributors-img.