Generating shorter aliases from .gitconfig file

In previous articles I showed how to configure aliases in your ~/.gitconfig file.

As you might have noticed you need to type git alias which might be inconvenient. Even if you make an alias g=git you have to remember to type space between g and alias.

To make things easier we can automatically generate shell aliases from the .gitconfig file:

	# generate aliases from gitconfig aliases
	function generateAliasesFromGit() {
	git config --get-regexp ^alias\\. | while read gitAlias; do
	local aliasName=$(echo $gitAlias | sed -E 's/^alias\.([a-z_\-]*).*/\1/')
	# alias only if there is no collision
	if ! type "g$aliasName" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
	alias g$aliasName="git $aliasName"
	fi
	done
	}
	generateAliasesFromGit

view raw generateAliasesFromGit.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

here we grep all the git config values from alias section and get the alias name with sed. Then we check that alias g + alias name doesn't already exist and set it.

Now, if you had for instance alias a = add you can type both g a and ga.

That's it.