the impact of git and github in the programmer community continues to amaze me. it appears that almost all major open source projects have made the switch to git at this point. naturally, i got interested too and started using git for my latest software project. however, coming from subversion, i found it not that convenient at first. here are two small tips that helped me become more comfortable with git, effectively making it behave more like subversion.
shorter status messages
the first one is about the status command. i find the default output of git status overly verbose. luckily, there is a more concise version: git status -s (for “short”). its output looks similar to the output of what you get from subversion. run the following command to configure git to always show the short status report:
git config status.short true
commit in one command
the second tip concerns the committing of changes. the normal workflow of making changes and committing them to the repo requires only two steps with subversion (modify a file, commit), while we need three steps with git (modify file, stage (“add”), commit). it seemed unnecessary and inconvenient having to issue separate stage and commit commands for the same action that required only one step in subversion. while there may be good reasons why git keeps those two steps apart, i wished for a shortcut. and in fact, there is one. if you use commit with the -a option (for “all”), it will directly commit all changes without the need for staging them first. a typical command may look like this:
git commit -am "implemented XY"
with these two measures, i found git to be much more usable.
