Living document with my own personal tips and tricks for using git. I will update this periodically as I find things.

Adding Aliases

Inside your ~/.gitconfig, you can add a section for aliases. These enable you to add quick shortcuts when using git. You can quickly add an alias for a lot of the other tips here.

For example, here is a snippet of my personal ~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
	st = status
	co = checkout
  chadoc = diff master --name-only **/*.adoc

This enables me to git co for checkout and git st for status instead of writing the full command.

The latter example is a shortcut for seeing which AsciiDoc files are different on my current branch from master. This enables very quick opening of these files in Vim with :args `git chadoc` or vim $(git chadoc) from a shell.

Diffing Branches

You can use git diff to compare changes between branches.

With no arguments (i.e. git diff), it will output the diff for all unstaged changes.

git diff --name-only

This shows only the names of the files with changes.

git diff src

This would show all the changes in the src directory.

git diff master

Assuming there is a branch named master, this would show the changes between HEAD and master.

git diff master HEAD

Equivalent to previous.

git diff HEAD master

Reverse of previous. i.e. additions appear as removals and vice-versa.

git diff master --name-only

Shows only the names of the files with changes.

git diff **/*.adoc

Only shows diff for files ending with .adoc.

git diff master **/*.adoc --name-only

Shows the names of files changed between HEAD and master, but limited to .adoc files.

vim $(git diff master **/*.adoc --name-only)

Opens all .adoc files that have been changed between HEAD and master in Vim.

Note that trying to pipe into xargs creates other issues. While you can handle stdin properly by using the -o option, Vim itself does not seem to run your .vimrc in this mode.

:args `git diff master **/*.adoc --name-only`

Same as above but for use if you’re already inside Vim. Note the backticks.