Tag: git

a distributed version control system that has taken over the world

git diff-highlight
Diff output from git can be hard to read. Luckily there’s a nice tool bundled with git that can help us out.

Enter diff-highlight, a little perl script found in git’s contrib directory.

From its own documentation:

[diff-highlight] post-processes the line-oriented diff, finds pairs of lines, and highlights the differing segments.

diff-highlight is shipped in a default git install but it needs to be bundled and added to your $PATH. Here’s how to do it on debian:
```
$ sudo make -C /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight /usr/local/bin/
```
Now you can pipe git’s diff output to to diff-highlight to get a better view of what actually changed.
```
git diff | diff-highlight
```
Optionally, you can configure git to use it all the time. Add the following to your ~/.gitconfig:
```
[pager]
log = diff-highlight | less
show = diff-highlight | less
diff = diff-highlight | less
```
See the documentation for more usage tips!
2022.07.20
Default git branch name
Update:

As of git 2.28, there’s a new configuration option and you don’t need to use the templateDir option:
```
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
```
Changing git’s default branch name has come up recently as an easy action we can take to update our language and remove harmful ideas from our daily usage.

I’m concerned that this effort to change the language used is ultimately a symbolic gesture to avoid scrutiny into actual change (notably github’s push for this change and continued contracts with ICE).

However, it’s an easy change to make.

Let’s have a look at how to change it for new repos:
```
mkdir -p ~/.config/git/template
echo "ref: refs/head/main" > ~/.config/git/template/HEAD
git config --global init.templateDir ~/.config/git/template
```
Note that you can put this template dir anywhere you like.

You can also set this system-wide (not just for your user) in /usr/share, but note that this might get overridden by package updates.
```
echo "ref: refs/head/main" | sudo tee /usr/share/git-core/templates/HEAD
```
The next time you git init, you’ll be on a branch named main.

To change an existing repo, you can use the -m switch of git-branch:
```
git checkout master
git branch -m master main
```
Push with -u to your remote if needed and update the default branch in the repo settings in the hosting platform of choice.

It’s a relatively easy change, but don’t kid yourself that it makes any real impact. go protest, donate and sign petitions, and get out there to fix the actual problems.
2020.06.16
Dotfiles

Finally got around to updating my dotfiles to use gnu stow. I adapted ~tomasino’s makefile for use with the configs that I’m keeping with it.

Now I just need to figure out why my ssh config doesn’t copy/symlink my config to ~/.ssh when it already exists.

2018.07.22
git remotes with ssh aliases
Did you know that ~/.ssh/config aliases work for git remotes?

~/.ssh/config
```
Host gh
HostName github.com
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gh_key
```
You can now use gh:username/repo as the remote in place of git@github.com:username/repo, which is much shorter and easier to type many times!

git clone gh:benharri/learngit

There are many other use cases for the ssh_config file. For example, here is my config for the tilde machine for easy ssh connections.
```
Host tilde
HostName tilde.team
User ben
```
Then use ssh tilde to start a new ssh session. This also works with scp: try something like this scp file.txt tilde:workspace/. in place of scp file.txt ben@tilde.team:workspace/.

The ssh_config file is super useful. Check man ssh_config for a full list of options!
2018.01.12