Mike Pearce – blog

Using git after SVN is like driving a Ferrari after driving a Jaguar. Nimble, speedy, lovely. My word it’s beautiful.

Anyway, I’m learning my way around it and, recently, came across these two lovely things:

Colouring the git output (from @catchamonkey)

I didn’t realise how useful colouring the output of things like git diff and git status etc was until I’d done it. Follow the below:

%> vi ~/.gitconfig

This will open the global .gitconfig file for your CURRENT user in vi. It will probably look something like this:

[user]
 name = Mike Pearce
 email = mike.pearce@jellyfish.co.uk

Below all that, you’ll need to add this:

[color]
        ui = 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

Obviously, you can change the colours to suit your particular pallete, but the above are pretty cool!

Global Ignorance (via @nefarioustim)

Sometimes, you’ll want to ignore the same file for each git repo. You can add the ignored files to the git repo itself, or, if you know there’ll always be a file or files you want to ignore, you can add it to git excludes.

I use netbeans on a mac, so I generally ignore the following:

• .DS_Store
• ./nbproject
• *.pc (compiled python code)

You can do it by editing the .gitconfig file again:

%> vi ~/.gitconfig

Then adding the following lines somewhere:

[core]
 excludesfile = ~/.gitexcludes

OK, save then, then do this:

%> vi ~/.gitexcludes

and add each one on a new line:

DS_Store
nbproject
*.pc

Save that et voila. You’ll never be troubled with those files being added to your repo again.