Stupid git tricks

Decent GUIs

Git is remarkeable for how smooth, fast, and tiny it is as a command-line application.

Because of some as-yet unarticulated conservation law, this means that all the GUIs for it are clunky, slow, and bloated. To go from the magically simple experience of git, to one with better visualisation, you must sacrifice time upon the altar of thread locks.

• I am intermittently auditioning smartgit after being dissatisfied with the gigabyte of RAM that GitKraken and SourceTree demand to do basic stuff. Free for non-commerical use. (closed-source, USD99/yr for updates, free for non-commerical use)

  UPDATE: Apparently I deleted it for some reason so boring I can’t even remember. YMMV.

• gitkraken seems to be the sleekest and hippest, and runs everywhere. It also has the least horribly broken visualisation. It uses gigantic amounts of RAM. Rebase support is weak, visualisation is strong (closed-source, USD60/yr, free for non-commercial use)

• Sourcetree (closed source, free) is an adequate client on Windows and OSX, although it also uses gigantic amounts of RAM, and is slow in a particularly irritating way where the GUI controls keep on vanishing just as you are about to click on them. This could be improved by rebranding as a game of git-whack-a-mole, but my support tickets about this are going unanswered. On the plus side, it also supports mercurial, which is nice if increasingly irrelevent. Powerful rebase support, but it might crash half way through the rebase. Memory usage and responsiveness can be fixed by restarting it every hour or two.

• git-cola is open-source, in python. Haven’t used.

• giggle (open-source, Linux/GTK only) seems to be purely a repository viewer, but that’s actually done really badly generally, so is not completely useless.

• sparkleshare is designed for file syncing for designers, not versioning code for coders, but is also effectively a neat git GUI, with attention from designers, which as I have mentioned is a bit of a weak spot, in the same

subtrees

creatin’:

git fetch remote branch
git subtree add --prefix=subdir remote branch --squash

updatin’:

git fetch remote branch
git subtree pull --prefix=subdir remote branch --squash
git subtree push --prefix=subdir remote branch --squash

Rebasin’ despite ‘em is slow and involved

importing some files across a branch

git checkout my_branch -- my_file/

Garbage collecting

In brief, this will purge a lot of stuff from a constipated repo in emergencies:

git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now

In depth explanation.

Cleaning out all big files even from project history

bfg does that:

git clone --mirror git://example.com/some-big-repo.git
java -jar bfg.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 10M some-big-repo.git
cd some-big-repo.git
git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
git push

Making it work with a broken-permissions FS

e.g. you are editing a git repo on NTFS via Linux and things are silly.

git config core.filemode false

Splitting off a sub-project

Use subtree split to prise out one chunk. It has a few wrinkles but is fast and easy.

pushd superproject
git subtree split -P project_subdir -b project_branch
popd
mkdir project
pushd project
git init
git pull ../superproject project_branch

content-specific diffing

• jupyter diffing and merging is painful. Workaround: nbdime provides diffing and merging for notebooks. It has git integration:

  nbdime config-git --enable --global
  

• git-latexdiff, is the same for LaTeX.