Extending Git

Git provides a few mechanisms to extend it. You can add shortcuts and create new commands, and add support for new transports; all without requiring to modify Git sources.

Command aliases for Git

There is one little tip that can make your Git command-line experience simpler, easier, and more familiar, namely, Git aliases. It is very easy in theory to create an alias. You simply need to create an alias.<command-name> configuration variable; its value is the expansion of alias.

One of the uses for aliases is defining short abbreviations for commonly used commands and their arguments. Another is creating new commands. Here are a couple of examples you might want to set up:

$ git config --global alias.co checkout
$ git config --global alias.ci commit
$ git config --global alias.lg log --graph --oneline --decorate
$ git config --global alias.aliases 'config --get-regexp ^alias\.'

The preceding setup means that typing, for example, git ci would be the same as typing git...