Git aliases

An alias is a nice way to configure long and/or complicated Git commands to represent short useful ones. An alias is simply a configuration entry under the alias section. It is usually configured to --global to apply it everywhere.

Getting ready

In this example, we will use the jgit repository, which was also used in Chapter 1, Navigating Git, with the master branch pointing at b14a93971837610156e815ae2eee3baaa5b7a44b. Either use the clone from Chapter 1, Navigating Git, or clone the repository again, as follows:

$ git clone https://git.eclipse.org/r/jgit/jgit
$ cd jgit
$ git checkout master && git reset --hard b14a939

How to do it...

First, we'll create a few simple aliases, then a couple of more special ones, and finally a couple of aliases using external commands. Instead of writing git checkout every time we need to switch branches, we can create an alias of that command and call it git co. We can do the same for git branch, git commit, and git status as follows:

$ git...