These are a few git aliases I’ve made recently to make my life a little easier. The first two are for displaying the log, and the rest for merging. See the Git wiki for more on how to add aliases.

Logs

I pretty much always want the one-line log, so this is the basic version of that:

ls = log --oneline --decorate

--decorate shows any labels on commits, such as branch names. Sometimes I want the above but with the graph view turned on:

lg = log --oneline --decorate --graph

Merging

Merges in git fall into two basic categories: fast-forward merges in which the branch label is simply updated to a new commit (but no new commit is made), and all other merges in which a new commit is made with multiple parents.

By default the merge command will attempt to do a fast-forward merge. If that won’t work it will move to some other “real” merge strategy. I think the difference between fast-forward and the other merges is sufficient that they shouldn’t happen with the same command so I’ve set up aliases to separate them. First the alias for doing a fast-forward. This will fail if a fast-forward is not possible:

ff = merge --ff-only

And then an alias for forcing a non-fast-forward merge even in situations where a fast-forward would be possible:

mrg = merge --no-ff

(This is the sort of merge GitHub does when you merge a pull request.)

Pulling

The pull command is really fetch + merge so it takes most of the same options. When I do a pull I generally only want it to succeed if it’s possible to fast-forward my local branch. If git must do a real merge something is probably wrong, so I have a fast-forward-only pull alias:

ffpull = pull --ff-only