Development

Git-Tool is capable of more than just file organization, its great cross-platform autocomplete support makes it ideally suited to solving some other common problems we run into during our day-to-day development.

switch v2.1.16+

Git has recently shipped with a wonderful new switch command which simplifies changing branches (when compared to the sometimes confusing git branch and git checkout -B combination). We're big fans of Git-Tool's autocomplete though, so we've wrapped all the lovely git goodness up in Git-Tool and paired it with our search engine to make your life just that much easier.

Warning

This command has replaced the old gt branch command since v2.2.0 as it serves the same purpose and uses the same command line arguments.

Aliases

  • gt switch
  • gt sw
  • gt branch
  • gt b
  • gt br

Options

  • -N, --no-create prevents the branch from being created if it doesn't exist already.

Example

# Checks out the feature/demo branch, creating it if it doesn't exist yet
gt sw feature/demo

# Checks out the feature/demo branch if it exists
gt b -N feature/demo

ignore v1.0+

Setting up your .gitignore files and keeping them updated can be a bit of a faff. It takes time, it doesn't add much core value and we often forget little things when then require us to clean out repo history.

gitignore.io is one approach to solving this. It offers a wide range of pre-built .gitignore files for different languages and frameworks. Git-Tool gives you a command which combines this with some useful metadata to allow quick updates and additions.

Aliases

  • gt ignore
  • gt gitignore

Options

  • --path allows you to specify the path to the .gitignore file you wish to update. By default, this will be ./.gitignore.

Example

# View the list of all supported .gitignore languages/frameworks
gt ignore

# Add a .gitignore file (or update your existing one) for Node.js and C#
gt ignore node csharp

Tips

Git-Tool will automatically fetch the latest ignore files from gitignore.io for the languages you have added whenever you run gt ignore $LANG and retain changes you made outside the metadata blocks.

prune v2.3.0+

If you're the kind of person who uses branches and Pull Requests to make changes to your repositories, you'll often end up with a small horde of branches in your local repository which are remnants of previously merged PRs. Cleaning these out can be a bit of a chore, so Git-Tool provides a prune command which will identify any merged branches (using git branch --merged) and remove them for you automatically.

Options

  • -y, --yes will skip the confirmation prompt and remove any branches that are found.

Example

# Remove any merged branches from your local repository
gt prune