One thing that always puzzled me a bit about my own workflow, is that almost all of it is based in the terminal (I use Vim and Tmux), except for Git: where most people seem to use the Git CLI commands, I use a graphical program (Fork, which is quite good).

Another thing then: I never used Github professionally, apart from the time I was a self employed web developer, but back then I was the only developer on my projects. All my previous jobs had a self-hosted Gitlab running somewhere.

Long story short: I am trying to get better at Git in the terminal and using Github. And 'better at Git' to me both means 'being able to confidently rebase' as well as 'customise my workflow'.

Aliases in the Gitconfig file

Customising Git means setting configuration in the ~/.gitconfig file. This file contains settings for Git, like your name and email, but can also be used to add aliases. To create the first alias you can run git config --global alias.co checkout. After this, you can use git co as git checkout, which is shorter to type and yes I use this often now.

Another alias I have is this one:

publish = !git push --set-upstream origin $(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)

If you try to push a branch that has no linked branch on Github (the upstream), Git will complain about it. It will be nice to you and state the command you should have ran, but I got tired of having to copy and paste that new command.

fatal: The current branch feature/new-shoes has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

    git push --set-upstream origin feature/new-shoes

In Fork, this was just a checkbox away. With my new git publish command I get the convenience again: it will push the branch and set the upstream with the same name as I have locally, exactly as Git suggested I should have done, but in less typing.

Links to Github

So far we have seen two kinds of aliases: one that just aliases a simple Git command (b = branch) and one that actually ran a shell command, because we started it with a ! (note that you will have to start with ! git there). But there is another way: having a command that starts with git- in your path.

I have the following file as ~/bin/git-github, marked as executable (chmod +x ~/bin/git-github) and in my path (export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" in my ~/.zshrc file):

#!/bin/zsh

local url
url=$(git remote get-url $(git remote))
url=$(echo $url | sed 's/.*github\.com[:\/]\(.*\).git$/https:\/\/github.com\/\1/')

if [ -n "$1" ]; then
  append="/$1/$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)"
fi

open -u "$url$append"

Yes, my ZSH is crude. Yes, I can better share this in Bash. Yes, it could've probably been on one line and be included as an alias in my Gitconfig. But it works for me.

The command figures out the Github URL of the project, based on the URL of the remote (it assumes you have only one). It then opens that URL with the macOS open command. If an argument is given, it appends that to the URL, with the name of the branch too.

In my Gitconfig I have two aliases that use this command:

pr = github pull/new
compare = github compare

With git github, my default browser will open a tab with the 'homepage' of the repository. With git compare, it will open a tab that contains a diff of the current branch and the default branch on Github (the remote versions of those). With git pr, the browser will open the correct page to open a for the current branch.

And you mentioned Vim and Tmux?

Yes, I actually use the obligatory Tim Pope plugin Fugitive. This means I can do a lot of things which you can also read about in the help file. (Which I read a lot these days.)

But this allows me to stage and commit and rebase and reword all my changes in Vim, and then when I am ready, run :G publish and :G pr and make a PR for it on Github. These two commands alone make me feel so much more productive: no longer do I have to search for another program to compose commits and then search for the browser to handle the cooperative side of it... I just handle everything in my editor.

For Tmux I have another nice addition: in my ~/.tmux.conf I have the following command:

bind-key y display-popup -E -h "90%" "git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all"

This will – when I press <prefix> + y – open a popup window, which closes when the command exits and has a certain height. It will show me an ASCII-art style graph of all the commits – one of the features I missed from Fork – as an overlay over my editor, a small keystroke away.

With this configuration – and a lot of reading the Fugitive help file – I feel much more at home with Git in the terminal.

I also watched this fantastic series on mastering Git and these unfortunately dated but still useful screencasts on Fugitive.