README.md

Most of these programs have intelligible usage messages, or comments in the source code that explain the usage, or both. My favorites are git-vee and git-re-edit. Here is a brief summary of what they do.

git-addq is a simple wrapper around git-dirtyfiles and menupick that gives a menu of dirty files and asks which ones you want added to the index. Options are passed to git-dirtyfiles, so -q includes unknown files in the menu. menupick is available in my util repository.

git-command is a shell alias. If you make a symbolic link, say commit, that points to git-command, then you now have a commit command that actually runs git-commit.

git-dirtyfiles lists the files in the repository that have been edited since the last commit, ignoring unknown files by default, but including them if you pass -q. With a commit argument, lists the files that were changed in that commit. This exists mainly to be a back-end for git-re-edit; see below.

git-fetchs fetches all branches from all the remotes that you have previously fetched from. This is primarily useful if you have a bunch of remotes that you don't normally fetch. At a previous employer, we had a repo setup script that would add one remote for each coworker. But in most repos I would only want to fetch from the coworkers with whom I was actually collaborating.

git-ff-branch fast-forwards a branch that might not be checked out. For example, suppose you do git fetch remote, find that remote/master has updated, and you would like to move master to point to remote/master. You can use git ff-branch master (if master is set up to track remote/master, or git ff-branch master remote/master (if not). Or you can just use git ff-branch -r remote to fast-forward all refs that track branches on remote. The command will not modify any head except by fast-forwarding.

git-files passes its arguments to git-log, extracts only the names of the changed files from the output, and prints each one exactly once on standard output, omitting files that no longer exist in the current working tree. (Work in progress; see NOTES/git-files.)

git-forcepush is for pushing non-fast-forward updates to branches in repositories that normally forbid that. It does it by deleting the old branch first.

git-get retrieves miscellaneous information about the repository. For example, how does a program retrieve the name of the currently-checked-out branch? One common answer is the ridiculous git branch | grep '^\*' | cut -c3-. Another is the equally ridiculous git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --abbrev-ref HEAD. With git-get you don't have to remember that nonsense: you use git get current-branch-name. To check if the repository is dirty, you use git get is-working-tree-dirty and it exits successfully if so, and unsuccessfully if not. It is easy to drop in new subcommands; every time I find out there is no easy way to determine some bit of git information, I drop it in here. git get with no argument prints a list of available information.

git-getpr takes a pull request number and pulls the change branch from Github or Gitlab into the local repository. Then it creates a worktree for the branch. The -d option cleans up again. The worktree is under /tmp/mjd by default; patches welcome.

git-git is the reverse of git-command. If you accidentally type git git commit, then git-git will silently run git commit for you. (This used to be a program but is now a line in .gitconfig.)

git-last-file-change searches the current branch to find the most recent commit that modified a file whose name contains the specified substring, and prints the SHA of that commit. Typical uses: git commit --fixup $(git lfc somefile) or git re-edit $(git lfc somefile)

git-lst lists the files in the specified directory, from most-recently to least-recently committed, with the last commit times. It is very much a work in progress; it should have many options, but doesn't. Unlike git-ls-date it is fast and doesn't fail completely in large repos. The name lst is supposed to remind you of ls -t and also of "LaST changes".

git-pusho is for pushing local branches to a shared repository. If your username is fred and you have branch topic checked out, then git pusho is equivalent to git push origin topic:fred/topic. Unrecognized options are passed along to git-push.

git-q is for quick queries. You give it a bunch of commit-ishes and it prints out their short hashes and commit dates, one per line, so that you can see which one was first. But if the first argument begins with a %, it is interpreted as a request for something other than the commit date, so that git q %ae gets the author email addresses instead, and git q %s gets the subjects and so forth. The full list of requestable information is documented in git-log.

git-quick-commit is just a git-add -u followed by git-commit, but in between it uses git-diff --cached to show you the staged changes that will be committed, and asks you to confirm whether it should continue. All command-line arguments are passed to git-commit.

git-quickpush is useful when you want to push commits to a branch that is frequenty updated by many other people: You fetch the branch, rebase your commits onto the branch, then push the branch---and the push fails because someone else pushed to the branch after you fetched and before you pushed. git-quickpush does the three operations in quick succession, and if it fails it's easy to rerun. git-quickmerge is similar. You specify a branch to merge to, and some additional options to the git-merge command, and it fetches the target branch, merges to it, and pushes it back, again in quick succession.

git-re-edit runs git-dirtyfiles and invokes the editor on all the currently-dirty files, or if there are no dirty files, the files that changed in the last commit.

1. Suppose you left your working directory dirty when you went home, and for some reason the editor has exited, and you want to open up the editor again to edit the same batch of files. That is the basic use case. You invoke "git re-edit" and it runs the editor on the dirty files.
2. After git reset HEAD^, use git re-edit to invoke the editor on the files that were changed in the last commit.
3. During an interactive rebase that results in a complicated merge, you would like to run the editor on the conflicted files to resolve the conflicts. git re-edit will do that.
4. You or a coworker refactors some code. Later, you'd like to refactor the same code some more. Use git re-edit commit to edit the files that were changed in that commit.

git-todays-commits is supposed to list the commits that I made today.

git-treehash compares the object IDs of the trees of two or more commits. This tells you if the commits have identical contents. For example, after a rebase in which commits are reordered, the new commit should have an identical tree to the original commit. git treehash with no arguments will compare the trees of HEAD and ORIG_HEAD. If they are identical, it will print out the single hash of the tree. Otherwise, it will print out both hashes, labeled. Given multiple commits, it will print out all the tree hashes, each labeled with the ref names to which it applies, so that you can see which commits have identical trees and which don't.

git-vee compares two branches, showing the history back to the point at which they diverged. By default it compares the current HEAD with its remote-tracked branch:

git vee                 # compare current head branch and its remote tracking branch
git vee remote          # compare current head branch and its analog on the remote
git vee remote branch   # compare branch and remote/branch
git vee branch          # compare HEAD and branch
git vee branch1 branch2 # compare branch1 and branch2

Commits are indicated with stars, except that commits that are present in both branches are indicated with = signs.

git-what-changed gets options and arguments like those for git-log, and then emits the filenames, and only the filenames, that have been changed in the selected commits. By default this lists the changed files in reverse chronological order. I have an alias, git myfiles, which means git what-changed --author=mjd, which lists the files I have recently touched.

git-whats records a description for a branch, or prints a previously recorded description.

trim is not really a git command. It trims trailing whitespace from the files named in its arguments.

conf/dot-gitconfig and conf/dot-gitignore contain my personal .gitconfig and .gitignore files.

bash_completion.d contains completion scripts, which, if sourced, will enable bash command-line completion for some of these commands.

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A discussion of how I use some of these tools is available at My Git Habits.