Head First Git

Chapter 8. Making your life Easier with Git: #ProTips

So far in this book, you’ve learned how to use Git. But you can also bend Git to your will. That’s where the ability to configure Git plays a vital role. You’ve already seen how to configure Git in previous chapters—in this chapter we’ll be exploring a lot more of what you can configure to make your life easier. The configuration can also help you define shortcuts: long-winded Git commands begone!

There’s a lot more you can do to make your interaction with Git easier. We’ll show how you can tell Git to ignore certain types of files so that you don’t accidentally commit them. We’ll give you our recommended ways of writing commit messages and tell you how we like to name our branches. And to top it off, we’ll even explore how a graphical user interface to Git can play an important role in your workflow. #letsgo #cantwait

Configuring Git

Git ships with a certain set of defaults. So far in this book, you’ve used the git config command to set or override some of these settings to better suit your needs. However, it doesn’t stop here—you can tweak Git’s behavior to do all kinds of things to make your life easier. Understanding where Git stores this configuration, and all that it is capable of, can really improve your overall experience.

Here’s a quick reminder of how we told Git our name, so it knows to give us credit every time ...