Brooks's Blog

Git is a technology that has benefited me greatly from learning (and I assume any developer for that matter). It is functionally a save button for developers. When first learning to code, I relied almost exclusively on "undoing" to save myself from mistakes. What a terrible time that was. Now if I make mistakes, I don't have to spam my text editor with "ctrl + z" (though I still find myself doing this from time to time).

Before I get into explaining what Git aliases are and why they're useful, I'd like to briefly explain what Git even is and the relationship between Git and a remote repository service. All you currently need to know is they make version control easier on the command line.

Git is used on a local machine (a computer). The developer uses Git by entering Git commands on their command line to prepare text files for editing or saving (and probably other neat purposes I have yet to discover). Git is best paired with a remote repository service that stores developers' local repositories online and allows them to share their work with other developers, backup their projects online, and so on.

GitHub is by far the most commonly used repository hosting service. To be frank, in my short time of being a developer, I'm uneducated in other repository hosting services. I have only ever encountered other developers using GitHub; I feel no need to use an alternative.

Git is a version control system. GitHub is a remote repository service. They work in tandem to be one of the many technologies that add structure in a codebase.

There are a handful of Git commands that are used most commonly by developers. They eventually find commands they use the most. This means they are constantly repeating certain commands all day, every day.

This leads me into Git aliases.

Git aliases are exactly what they sound like. Aliases for the Git command they are assigned to. Aliases normally take the form of a short combination of letters. They are helpful for reducing keystrokes for common commands.

For example, I often use the command "git commit -m" followed with a message that describes what that commit is accomplishing (commits are the "saves" in Git). An alias for this could look like "ci = commit -m" in the .gitconfig file. Instead of writing the entire command, now the command gets replaced with "ci" followed by the commit message.

One of my favorite Git commands to use is "commit --amend -C HEAD." This command adds the code into the previous commit (technically it doesn't add the code, but that's outside the scope of this article). I use this command often because I find myself committing too early and needing to add the current code into my last commit. So I decided to create an alias for it.

I assigned the command to "ag" in my .gitconfig file and now all I type is "git ag" and it amends my git the way I want it to!

Git aliases are an easy way to make version control on the command line a tad bit easier. I encourage anyone that uses Git on the command line to use them.