A Quick git/vim Workflow Tip

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Git makes it incredibly easy to work on a lot of a project’s features at once, hopping quickly back and forth between branches. I love this ability, but I hate remembering what exactly it was that I was working on in a particular branch. I know it had something to do with a particular bug, but I’ve no idea anymore which files I was fiddling around with to fix it.

Enter git vim. I’ve set up two trivial alias in my ~/.gitconfig file to either show me a list of files effected by a particular revision or range, and to directly open them in my editor of choice so that I’m back to work as quickly as possible.

[alias]
  ...
  fshow = ! sh -c 'git show --pretty="format:" --name-only $1 | grep -v "^$" | uniq | sed -e "s#^#`git rev-parse --show-toplevel`/#"' -
  vim   = ! sh -c 'vim `git fshow $1`' -
  mate  = ! sh -c 'mate `git fshow $1`' -
  edit  = ! sh -c '$EDITOR `git fshow $1`' -

The first alias calls git show to get a list of all the files touched by a revision or range, filters out empty lines, and ensures that the paths are absolute after deduplicating the list of files. Any valid revision or range will work: HEAD, 37ad159, master.., etc.

To see a list of files changed over the last four revisions, I could type:

$ git fshow HEAD~5..
lib/rocco/layout.rb
lib/rocco/layout.mustache
lib/rocco.rb
rocco.gemspec
test/helper.rb
test/test_reported_issues.rb

To open those files for editing, I’d use the second alias:

$ git vim HEAD~5..

If I wanted to open the files in TextMate instead, I’d use the third:

$ git mate HEAD~5..

Or, if I was clever enough to set up an $EDITOR environment variable (which I should do, given that it’s used all over the place on the shell), I could use the last alias to open the files in whatever program that was set to:

$ git edit HEAD~5..

I can hop from branch to branch, and open all the relevant files quickly and easily. It’s a small thing, but it’s made a big difference in my workflow over the last week or three.

— Mike West