Terminal tuning for Git developers in Mac

Fri, Sep 19, 2014

TAGS:undefined If you work with Git in the terminal there are some tweaks you might want to apply to your prompt for safer and faster coding. The following lines are part of my ~/.bash_profile file. I use it on Mac although that might work in Linux as well.

You can copy and paste this code in your ~/.bash_profile (create it if it doesn't exist), save and open a new terminal to see the changes every time you save. What you get of this script is:

Prompt with colors
Show the current git branch in parenthesis
Autocomplete previous ssh hosts when you press TAB
Autocomplete branches with TAB. Useful when your branches have names like feature/PRJ-540--simplification-of-the-user-interface

# I like tunning the colors of the prompt in the first place:
export CLICOLOR='true'
export  LSCOLORS="gxfxcxdxbxCgCdabagacad"
export EDITOR=vi

# Git branch in good-looking prompt.
parse_git_branch() {
    git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/'
}

# Prompt with Git branch
# Explanation of the weird lines: \u Username, \h Host, \w Path, tput setaf is the color definition

export PS1='\[$(tput setaf 7)\]\u@\[$(tput setaf 2)\]\h:\[$(tput setaf 4)\]\w\[$(tput setaf 1)\]$(parse_git_branch)\[$(tput sgr0)\] $ '

# Bonus track: SSH autocompleting hostnames, write ssh and press tab
complete -W "$(while read line; do echo ${line%%[, ]*}; done < ~/.ssh/known_hosts)" ssh

# Git autocompletion
# Requires that you execute the following commented line:
# curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -o ~/.git-completion.bash
test -f ~/.git-completion.bash && . $_

Another useful thing is having an improved git log like the one in the following image:You can invoke this git log with the command git lg if you write once the following:

git config --global alias.lg "log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)%Creset' --abbrev-commit"