My Secret Weapon: Single-Letter Git Aliases

Today I want to share my favourite Git aliases that I’ve built up over the years. If you haven’t heard of a Git alias, it’s basically a way to add your own custom commands to Git. Think of it as a personal shortcut for frequently used Git operations (you can check out the official docs here for the technical deep dive).

You could add these to your shell directly, and they’d work pretty similarly. But for me, that requirement of still having to type git first really keeps them nicely ring-fenced. It helps keep my mental space focused just on Git commands. Plus, since I use these constantly, they’re all single-letter commands. If you’re doing everything on the shell, you might run out of good single letters (depending on your shell, you’ve only got so many!). Here, I still have a limit, but it’s focused specifically on Git commands, so I’m not going to hit it anytime soon.

My Go-To: git u (Update Branch)

First up is u. This one is for updating my branch. Most days, before I even start coding, I want to update my feature branch to main. I also like to do a bit of clean-up to keep Git per formant and my local repo tidy. Man, this used to be a bunch of things I had to remember to do:

1. Switch to main… except it might also be master, release, or staging. I bounce between multiple teams and clients, and remembering which one is which each time can be tiring.
2. Run fetch --prune to clean up any local branches that no longer exist on the remote. Keeps things neat!
3. Pull the latest changes into my local main.
4. Run maintenance for performance goodness.
5. Switch back to my feature branch and merge those fresh changes across.

That’s a lot of individual commands, right? Today, that’s just git u. Internally, the alias looks like this:

alias.u=!git switch $(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@') && git fetch --prune && git pull && git maintenance run && git switch - && git merge $(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@')

Now, where this still messes up for me is on one client where their main is actually production, but their workflow dictates pulling from staging… so it’s a bit weird. And then there’s the classic rebase vs. merge debate. I landed on merge for this alias since it’s often safer, but I do wonder if I could build a smarter system to try rebase, and if that has issues, then switch to merge. Food for thought!

Branching Out with git n (New Branch)

Next up is n. This one is for creating a new branch. Take everything from the u command above, except for the last step (merging back). Instead, I want to type in a new branch name, and it creates that new branch for me. That was super easy to integrate using read, and the final alias looks like this:

alias.n=!git switch $(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@') && git fetch --prune && git pull && git maintenance run && read -p 'New branch name: ' branch && git switch -c $branch

And there you have it! These two aliases have saved me countless keystrokes and mental gymnastics over the years.