A few days ago I posted this article about how I set up my machine after re-installing OS.
I forgot a few nice steps I do, and it was a pain to find out what I was missing, and all of them were related to git settings.
Global Gitignore
Don't you hate when you have to add the same lines to .gitignore files all the time? Those damned .DS_Store files Mac drops in every folder you zip and unzip.
Well, instead of doing a copy-paste in every .gitignore you can have a global one.
I usually dump mine in ~ and it looks like so
-> % cat ~/.gitignore
.DS_Store
[Tt]humbs.db
.idea
Now to make it official:
-> % git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
From now on no stinking DS_Store will make it to your VCS.
Nano instead of Vim as Editor
If you ever worked with a team, you know that sometimes you need also to pull from a branch, and by default (usually) git calls vim to edit stuff like commit messages, who wants that!? Yuck.
You can change it to nano and have a much nicer life.
-> % git config --global core.editor "nano"
of course, you can change it to code or whatever you want it to be, but I find a cli text editor is easier to use from cli.
Disable default pager
Again, If you ever worked with a team, you know that sometimes you need to switch branches.
And if the team does not clean after themselves you will have LOADS of branches, git by default uses | less kind of to page the result.
I HATE IT.
I want to see them all.
Well this command got my back
git config --global pager.branch false
Zip dat Git
Small bonus command, which is not a setting is if you want to share the content of a git repo without sharing also the gitignored files.
Imagine like me that you want to move a node script into your raspberry pi, without all the node_modules/ and other artifacts that would make the zip 90 Gb.
git archive -o `basename $PWD`.zip -9 HEAD
This command will generate a folder_name.zip file in the folder of the git repository, using the files presents until the last commit, and ignoring everything else that is not versioned.
Amazing.
Fin
And that is all folks.