Git is a powerful tool that is very user friendly when used from the Command Line Interface (CLI). There is no need to add Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools to simplify or visualize the output. What can help to make the CLI output more usable is to enable colors and to allow for some command abbreviations (aliases). Below you see the output we get when we run our commands.
Git colored output
As you can see, we configured the Git alias for “status”, so that it can be abbreviated with “st”. You can also see that the colored output has been enabled.
In Ubuntu colored diffs can be achieved be installed by using the “colordiff” tool. The “colordiff” tool is a replacement for the normal diff tool and can be used with the same arguments. It can be installed using “apt-get”, like this:
sudo apt-get install colordiff
However, Git does not require this because it has support for the colored diff built in.
This is the most useful output. It is an enhanced Git “log” output that we alias as “lg”. By adding color it becomes dramatically more usable.
Instructions
We assume you have enabled the colored prompt in “.bashrc” by uncommenting the “force_color_prompt=yes
” line as described in the previous Git post. Next you should add the following in your “~/.gitconfig” file:
[alias] lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative st = status [color] branch = auto diff = auto status = auto [color "branch"] current = yellow reverse local = yellow remote = green [color "diff"] meta = yellow bold frag = magenta bold old = red bold new = green bold [color "status"] added = yellow changed = green untracked = cyan
Save the file and try the commands. Enjoy!
Cool tip, thanks 🙂
@Hans: You are welcome!
Thank you René!
This should be enabled by default, really. Who is using Git on a dumb terminal?
Thanks ! this tip change my life :’)