Git Aliases #

After quite some time repeating the cycle of staging changes and commiting them, I've finally taken some time to try to break out of this loop. I was sure there were several solutions to this, maybe a bash script, some special flag, or git command to perform this in a single action. I found on SOF a much better solution than I expected.

Git already provides a way to have a better experience with repetitive commands: Git Aliases. To quote the git documentation, it is used to create commands that you think should exist. We can use an Alias and Git will simply execute the commands stored in the alias.

To set an alias:

git config --global alias.coa '!git add -A && git commit -m'

The global flag will make this alias available throughout all projects. The name of the alias is set with dot notation. To use it:

git coa 'Commit message'

Which looks smoother than:

git add -A
git commit -m 'Comit message'

Other good usage, illustraded in the git docs, is to check the last commit. Instead of entering the git log visualization, it's simpler to set an alias:

git config --global alias.last 'log -1 HEAD'

Then, git last will present the last commit directly.