Scribbles for my bad memory

You probably know:

• git diff shows unstaged changes.
• git diff --cached shows staged changes.

But how do you see all changes in one go? Just use:

git diff HEAD

Here's the breakdown:

• git diff compares the working directory to the staged index. If nothing is staged, it's the same as git diff HEAD.
• git diff --cached compares the staged index to HEAD. It's a shortcut for git diff --cached HEAD.
• git diff HEAD (or git diff <commit/branch/tag>) compares your current working directory with the specified commit.

We use feature/ticket-number-team-abbr as feature branch name, such as feature/mt-1234-axo at work.

If you mainly work with a huge repository. Everytime, you switch to the integration/main branch and run git pull before you create a feature branch, it would take a while as it needs to update your work directory and normally there are a lot of files changed.

I use a different way which is a little bit speedy. Whatever which branch you are now in, run

git fetch && git checkout -b feature/mt-xxxx-axo origin/integration 

It helps but I still need to type the above, which is still a lot of letters! So, I create a bash script to help me more,

see the following command nbi 38546

nbi 38546
remote: Enumerating objects: 22, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (22/22), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Total 22 (delta 17), reused 22 (delta 17), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (22/22), 4.43 KiB | 5.00 KiB/s, done.
From github.com:Euronet-XE/DFX
   941796a8a..11f76bff7  feature/mt-38183-fugu -> origin/feature/mt-38183-fugu
 * [new branch]          feature/mt-39492-ice  -> origin/feature/mt-39492-ice
 * [new branch]          feature/mt-39744-ice-card -> origin/feature/mt-39744-ice-card
branch 'feature/mt-38546-axo' set up to track 'origin/integration'.
David.Wei @ /d/git/xemt-core/dfx - [feature/mt-38546-axo] $

what’s in this nbi script? here it is

cat ~/bin/nbi
#!/bin/bash

# Check if the current directory is a git repository
if ! git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree &>/dev/null; then
    echo "Error: Current directory is not a git repository."
    exit 1
fi

# Run git fetch to get the latest changes from the remote repository
git fetch

# Determine the action based on the script name
case "$(basename "$0")" in
    nbi)
        # Check if an argument is provided
        if [[ $# -eq 1 ]]; then
            # Run git checkout to create and switch to a new branch based on the integration branch
            git checkout -b "feature/mt-$1-axo" "origin/integration"
            exit $?
        else
            echo "Usage: $0 <anumber>"
            exit 1
        fi
        ;;
    nbm)
        # Check if an argument is provided
        if [[ $# -eq 1 ]]; then
            # Run git checkout to create and switch to a new branch based on the main branch
            git checkout -b "feature/mt-$1-axo" "origin/main"
            exit $?
        else
            echo "Usage: $0 <anumber>"
            exit 1
        fi
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Error: Unsupported script name."
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

why do I call it nbi ? haha, it is a ABBR from new branch from integration

Wait, why did I mention nbm in the script? Yes, you can copy this nbi script with name nbm , then using the nbm command it will work the same way with the repositories that use main as the integration branch.

Did you see? How lazy I am!

2024-07-22 Update: I also wrote another script sw to ease the switching branches operation:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if the user provided a number
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: sw <number>"
  exit 1
fi

# Construct the branch name
branch_name="feature/mt-$1-axo"

# Switch to the branch
git switch "$branch_name"

# Check if the switch was successful
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "Switched to branch '$branch_name'"
else
  echo "Failed to switch to branch '$branch_name'"
fi

git config diff.wsErrorHighlight all

Reference

set meld as an external diff tool, it is the Old way, which is no longer preferred

First you will need to create a simple wrapper script for meld

$ cat ~/bin/git-meld
#!/usr/bin/bash
exec Meld "$2" "$5"

Please don't forget to add the directory containes Meld.exe to your PATH environment variable.
if you are using a real Linux system instead of MSYS2, you will normally need to change Meld to meld and /usr/bin/bash to /bin/bash

After that, run git config --global diff.external git-meld. Ok, you have done. Every time you run git diff, meld will be called.

In case you want to temporarily disable the behaviour, run git diff --no-ext-diff

Normally it is enough for your daily diff job. However, there is also another approach that you can always keep the default text diff behaviour for git diff while you use git difftool for a gui diff.

Another way / Preferred way

Regarding this approach,

• don't set the diff.external config, so we will not change the default diff behaviour
• run the following config instructions:

  git config --global diff.tool meld
  git config --global difftool.prompt false
  

If you want a normal text diff, run git diff as usual. If you want a GUI diff, run git difftool instead.
PS. Based on my experience, the second way is more comfortable, so it is the preferred way.