Re: default aliases (ci, di, st, co)

[Ondrej Certik <ondrej@certik.cz>]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 2:58 AM, Luciano Miguel Ferreira
Rocha<luciano@eurotux.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 09:00:30AM +0200, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>>  Ondrej Certik wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > coming to git from mercurial and svn, here is the alias part of my
>> > .gitconfig:
>> > [alias]
>> >     ci = commit
>> >     di = diff --color-words
>> >     st = status
>> >     co = checkout
>> > And all is fine until I share commands to checkout my branch (for
>> > example) with other people, then basically I have to write those
>> > commands in full (e.g. commit, checkout, ...), since I cannot assume
>> > they have their .gitconfig setup the same way I do. Especially for
>> > people who are new to git.
>> > What is the view on this in the git community?
>>
>>
>>  Personally I think "plain" aliases like you use above are evil.
>>  git is not svn or mercurial. If you use it like svn you'll be
>>  surprised sooner or later and your workflow will feel awkward or
>>  just plain wrong. hg and git are very similar, but the fact that
>>  hg assumed the svn shorthands implies to me that they've tried
>>  to retain a compatibility that does not, in fact, exist.
>
> No, it just means that shorting common commands is useful and common.
>
>>  I have no simple aliases for any of the commands. There's just no reason
>>  for them since tab completion works so well.
>
> "Intelligent" bash completion always gets in my way, so I can't use it.
>
> I vote yes.



Thanks everyone for contributing to the discussion. So it seems that
most people are against such aliases.

I only want to correct one thing --- I use git exactly because it's
not svn and exactly because it's not mercurial, things like git
branches, git remote branches, rebase -i, are still truly unique, and
in my experience once one tries it, he never wants to come back.

That said, I do use "git ci" and "git st" very often and I don't think
it infers any kind of workflow. TAB completion doesn't help, because I
need to write "git stat<TAB>", e.g. I save exactly one letter., commit
is better, there I just need "git com<TAB>", but I am still faster
with my aliases. Maybe "git co" is nasty, but I never had any problems
with that either.

Ondrej