.gitconfig

When working with git, there's quite a few different settings that you can set to change your experience. A lot of people know about the defaults of user.name and user.email for identification, but there's loads more that you can set up.

Below, is a (mostly complete) copy of my ~/.gitconfig file. As well as identifying myself, I've added a few useful aliases, added colouring and configured which utilities to use for common actions.

My favourite option is probably help.autocorrect. Without it, git suggests a command close to the one you typed, but makes you type it yourself. With this enabled, it just runs it:

bash
$ git stats
    WARNING: You called a Git command named 'stats', which does not exist.
    Continuing under the assumption that you meant 'status'
    in 0.1 seconds automatically...

As well as that, I force any repositories that I own to be checked out as read/write, rather than read only. It's something I don't do much, but I don't even have to worry about it now.

ini
# Any GitHub repo with my username should be checked out r/w by default
# http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/564806957/public-but-hackable-git-submodules
[url "[email protected]:mheap/"]
insteadOf = "git://github.com/mheap/"

When looking at the alias section, you might notice that some of the commands start with a !. This means "run the following as a shell command". As it can be anything that can be executed, you can even provide a path to a script to run. In my .gitconfig, I run a script from ~/.dotfiles/bin. I say use the $ZSH variable from the environment as the base path for the script. Anything you can do on the CLI, you can do in your .gitconfig.

ini
[alias]
    wtf = !$ZSH/bin/git-wtf

You can find all of the git scripts in my dotfiles repository. They're the ones that start with git-.

Full .gitconfig

ini
# This is me
[user]
name = Michael Heap
email = [email protected]
# Set up some useful aliases
[alias]
co = checkout
ci = commit
sl = !git shortlog -sn
lg = !git log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate
wtf = !$ZSH/bin/git-wtf
# Add colour to ALL THE THINGS
[color]
diff = auto
status = auto
branch = auto
ui = true
[core]
# Set up a global excludes file
excludesfile = ~/.gitignore
# Which apps do I want to use with git?
editor = vim
pager = less -r
# Don't warn about whitespace conflicts when applying a patch
[apply]
whitespace = nowarn
# Autocorrect anything I typo
[help]
autocorrect = 1
# Any GitHub repo with my username should be checked out r/w by default
# http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/564806957/public-but-hackable-git-submodules
[url "[email protected]:mheap/"]
insteadOf = "git://github.com/mheap/"

.gitignore

For completeness, here's my personal ~/.gitignore file too

.DS_Store
.svn
*~
*.swp
*.rbc