A Look Inside My Personalized .gitconfig

Overview - How do I use git?

I use the CLI for almost everything except when I want to exclude files from the git add.

I never use the merge command, I always rebase. I prefer to have a cleaner history.

When I open a pull request I always have one unique commit. I update commits with —amend —no-edit and force push.

Before I start with my config detail, you can see your config with git config --list --show-origin --show-scope (it will also tell you the file location and the scope).

Separate work from side projects

[user]
  email = maxence.poutord@mail.com
  name = Maxence Poutord

# overrides for a specific folder
[includeIf "gitdir:~/code/company/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig-work

[includeIf "gitdir:~/code/company/"]
  email = maxence.poutord@work.com

Having includeIf allows you to better separate configs between your company project and your side projects. You can override with an entire gitconfig file or you can also override a property.

Sort branch&tags

[branch]
  sort = -committerdate

[tags]
  sort = -version:refname

When you git branch -a, everything is alphabetically sorted. With this, they will be ordered by the last commit date.

When you have gazillions of tags, it’s sometimes better to sort them the other way around. So you see the latest tags first.

Auto-cleanup

[fetch]
  prune = true

All git fetch will now clean branches that no longer exist on the remote repository.

Note: if you want to do a deep clean you can also run this git branch --no-merged | egrep -v "(^\*|main)" | xargs git branch -D .

Autocorrect mistyped command

[help]
  autocorrect = 1

This corrects you when you have a typo in your command. If you type git comit, git will assume that you meant ”commit” and run the command 0,1 second after.

Default branch

[init]
  defaultBranch = main

Set the default branch name to main (instead of master) for all newly created repositories.

Fancy Git diff

Delta is a syntax-highlighting pager for git diff. On Mac, you can install it with brew install delta.

[core]
  pager = delta

[delta]
  line-numbers = true
  navigate = true # use n and N to move between diff sections

After adding these lines, git diff will render like this:

Editor

[core]
  editor = vim

Change the editor (i.e. for commands like git commit --amend and git rebase).

💡Tips: To use VSCode instead of Vim, replace it with code --wait

Push

[push]
  autoSetupRemote = true

Git automatically sets up a remote tracking branch when you push a new local branch for the first time.

You will also get rid of messages like “fatal: The current branch demo has no upstream branch”.

Colors

[color]
  ui = auto
  branch = auto
  diff = auto
  status = auto

[color "status"]
  added = green
  changed = yellow
  untracked = red

[color "branch"]
  current = yellow reverse
  local = yellow
  remote = green

[color "diff"]
  meta = yellow bold
  frag = magenta bold
  old = red
  new = green

This is a bit personal but here are the colors I use.

Bonus - git log on steroids

I use bash aliases instead of git aliases.

alias glols='git log --graph --pretty='\''%Cred%h%Creset -%C(auto)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset'\'' --stat'
alias glol='git log --graph --pretty='\''%Cred%h%Creset -%C(auto)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset'\'
#                                              │                  │         │          │                  └─ committer name
#                                              │                  │         │          └─ date (relative)
#                                              │                  │         └─ message
#                                              │                  └─ decorations (branch, heads or tags)
#                                              └─ hash (abbreviated)

The first one will render this:

The second is the same but with the file list:

Conclusion

My gitconfig is in my dotfiles https://github.com/maxpou/dotfiles/blob/main/gitconfig.

When I was writing this post, I discovered about git rerere which seems to be interesting for resolving conflicts. But, I’m not confident enough with it to put it here. So I may edit this post later to add it :)

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About the author

Hey, I'm Maxence Poutord, a passionate software engineer. In my day-to-day job, I'm working as a senior front-end engineer at Orderfox. When I'm not working, you can find me travelling the world or cooking.

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