Displaying changes on different operating systems

There are a lot of git clients out there, but the one and only truth shows your CLI. A simple workflow to achieve this is:

  1. git fetch origin -p fetches the most current data from your origin repository and cleans up any no longer existing references.

  2. git status shows the status of the working directory, about tracked files and their staged state.

  3. git log shows the history of the working directory. Hit SPACE show more content and q to quite the view.

bakka$ git log
commit 45e9143531ef8d9a67845fcf62904b93ece34658
Author: Kacper Bak <github@kacperbak.de>
Date:   Sun Oct 4 19:34:08 2015 +0200

    Added more text

commit 174b974b227f09a06ee3323aecc3fdbc803c7a2b
Author: Kacper Bak <github@kacperbak.de>
Date:   Sun Oct 4 18:25:42 2015 +0200

    Started git changes content...

commit d49d54935226ce8bf1c6130a9e2d11d040b07b91
Author: Kacper Bak <github@kacperbak.de>
Date:   Sun Sep 13 18:36:24 2015 +0200

    Setting up a Git on the CLI - content added

...

This is very verbose, to reduce the noise type: git log --oneline

bakka$ git log --oneline
45e9143 Added more text
174b974 Started git changes content...
d49d549 Setting up a Git on the CLI - content added
886b9be Basic Bash content added

To see a tree view like in many typical GUI tools for git use: git log --graph --decorate --oneline

bakka$ git log --graph --decorate --oneline
* 45e9143 (HEAD, origin/feature/git-display-branches, feature/git-display-branches) Added more text
* 174b974 Started git changes content...
* d49d549 (origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) Setting up a Git on the CLI - content added
* 886b9be Basic Bash content added
* 411434b Basic Bash content added
* abb9055 Basic Bash content added
* 40a24fa Mac-os-x-tools article deleted
* 95a69b6 Generated all files with adoc 1.5.2
*   f289e9a Merge branch 'Daily-git-usage'
|\
| * 965dc97 Git section added
| * 963d9e3 Daily git usage added
|/
* 7c50a9b Test new content

It is always nice to have a more sophisticated UI, just be aware that those tools might not always show the current state of your working directory. Two light weight ones are gitg (for Ubuntu) or gitx (for Mac OS X) both can be simple started directly from your working directory by hitting its name.

Simple git GUI tool for Ubuntu Linux
$ gitg
gitg.png
Simple git GUI tool for Mac OS X
$ gitx
gitx.png

Setting up a Git on the CLI

There are a few convenience settings to use Git very smoothly from your command line interface like bash. Simple follow the links to achieve the wanted result:

Setting your user name and email in Git

git config --global user.name "Kacper Bak"
git config --global user.email "github@kacperbak.de"

Checking your username and email in Git

git config --global user.name
git config --global user.email

Enable CLI auto completion with tabulator key (Mac OS X)

  • Download the file git-completion.bash from the git-repository.

  • Copy it into your home folder like /Users/kaba/git-completion.bash

  • Enter the following into your .bash_profile

source ~/git-completion.bash

Setup basic aliases

git config --global alias.co checkout
git config --global alias.br branch
git config --global alias.ci commit
git config --global alias.st status
git config --global alias.lg "log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit"

Shows the current branch in the bash prompt

  • Download the file git-prompt.sh from the git-repository.

  • Copy it into your home folder like /Users/kaba/git-prompt.sh

  • Enter the following into your .bash_profile

source ~/git-prompt.sh
PS1="[\[\033[32m\]\w]\[\033[0m\]\$(__git_ps1)\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[32m\]$ \[\033[0m\]"

Number of commits per user

git shortlog -sne

Working with a local test repository

  • We assume that we are in an empty folder

  • Create a local repository with the name testrepo.

git init --bare testrepo

  • Type ls -al to get an overview.

  • As you can see the last command created a directory with the name testrepo.

  • To clone that repo we need the exact file system path. So type pwd to get your current location.

  • Now you can clone the repo with the following command.

git clone file:///Users/bakka/Projects/gitRepos/testrepo

  • As you can see, the testrepo name has been added to the end of the absolut path.

  • The command is using the file protocoll as we operate on our local machine.

Checkout a file from another branch

git checkout otherbranch myfile.txt

Revert to HEAD and reset ALL changes made

git reset --hard HEAD
git clean -fd
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