git-templates

A collection of useful Git aliases for enhanced productivity

A curated set of Git aliases that improve your command-line workflow with better logging, statistics, and repository management commands.

Available Aliases

Essential Aliases

• git ls - View commit history with a beautiful graph format

  • Shows date, hash, message, and author in color
  • Perfect for quickly scanning commit history

• git undo - Undo the last commit while keeping changes

  • Moves the last commit back to your working directory
  • Safe way to fix mistakes before re-committing

• git amend - Fix the last commit

  • Stages all changes and amends them to the previous commit
  • Great for fixing typos or forgotten files

• git alias - List all configured aliases

  • Shows all your Git aliases with color-coded output
  • Helpful for discovering available shortcuts

Synchronization

• git sync - Rebase current branch on top of the default branch

  • Fetches all changes and rebases cleanly

• git up - Update everything (pull, rebase, submodules)

  • Comprehensive update command for the entire repository

Repository Analysis

• git authors - Show commit counts by author

  • Lists all contributors with their commit counts

• git stats "Author Name" - Detailed statistics for a specific author

  • Shows files changed, lines added/deleted, and ratios

• git recent - Show recently modified branches

  • See which branches have been worked on recently

• git age - Show repository age and commit count

  • First and last commit dates with total commit count

• git activity - Show commit activity by hour of day

  • Visualize when commits are typically made

• git weekly - Show weekly commit statistics

  • Track commit activity over time

Search & Discovery

• git search "text" - Search commit history for specific content

  • Find when specific code was added or modified

• git big - Find the largest files in the repository

  • Identify files that are bloating the repository

• git filetypes - Show file type statistics

  • See the distribution of file extensions

Maintenance

• git cleanup - Clean up repository

  • Prunes remote branches, runs garbage collection, removes untracked files

• git reauthor "old@email.com" - Change author information

  • Updates all commits from a specific email to your current Git config
  • Warning: Rewrites history - use with caution

Installation

Clone this repository to your machine:

git clone https://github.com/avanderw/git-templates.git C:\git-templates

Configure Git to include these aliases globally:

git config --global include.path 'C:/git-templates/.gitalias'

Note: Use forward slashes (/) in the path for cross-platform compatibility.

Verify the installation:

git alias

Uninstallation

Remove the alias configuration:

git config --global --unset include.path

Updating

Navigate to the repository and pull the latest changes:

cd C:\git-templates
git pull

Windows Configuration

Setting Your Editor

Configure VS Code as your Git editor:

git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

Or use Notepad as a simple alternative:

git config --global core.editor notepad

Line Endings

Configure Git to handle Windows line endings properly:

# Convert LF to CRLF on checkout, CRLF to LF on commit
git config --global core.autocrlf true

Credential Management

Enable the Windows Credential Manager for storing Git credentials:

git config --global credential.helper manager

Diff Tool

Configure a visual diff tool (example using VS Code):

git config --global diff.tool vscode
git config --global difftool.vscode.cmd 'code --wait --diff $LOCAL $REMOTE'

Performance on Windows

Improve Git performance on Windows:

# Enable parallel index preload
git config --global core.preloadindex true

# Enable file system cache
git config --global core.fscache true

# Increase buffer size for better performance
git config --global http.postBuffer 524288000

User Configuration

Set your identity (required for commits):

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your.email@example.com"

Default Branch Name

Set the default branch name for new repositories:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgements

The hooks have been adapted from Sitebase/git-hooks.