/Git

Writing Commit Messages

- Simon Tatham tl;dr: “When I’ve looked at other guides, they don’t seem to be focusing on the most important things. The one that first started me making notes towards this article consisted of a 7-point list of guidelines, most of which were tiny details of the initial ‘subject line’ part of the commit – what tense to use, whether to end it with a full stop, capitalisation – and the final rule just said ‘Use the body to explain what and why vs. how’.” Simon shares his approach. 

featured in #516

Notes On Git's Error Messages

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia discusses various strategies she’s put into place when facing an unclear error messages in Git. “I’m going to go through a bunch of Git’s error messages, list a few things that I think are confusing about them for each one, and talk about what I do when I’m confused by the message.” 

featured in #505

What Happens on GitLab When You Do Git Push?

- Li Zhennan tl;dr: The post provides background on the internal structure of a Git repository and the Git data model, and then summarizes the end-to-end flow of a git push to GitLab over SSH and HTTP(S), highlighting interactions between the client, GitLab components, and the Git hooks. 

featured in #502

The “Current Branch" In Git

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “I’ve been thinking more about what the term “current branch” means in git and it’s a little weirder than I thought.” Julia shares 4 possible definitions and scenarios for each. 

featured in #500

Modern Git Commands And Features You Should Be Using

- Martin Heinz tl;dr: “Most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as add, commit, push or pull, like it's still 2005. Git however, introduced many features since then, and using them can make your life so much easier, so let's explore some of the recently added, modern git commands, that you should know about.” Martin presents Switch, Restore, Sparse Checkout, Worktree and Bisect. 

featured in #497

How HEAD Works In Git

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia ran a poll asking people how confident they were that they understood how HEAD works in Git. The results were a little surprising... people were unconfident about their understanding. “Usually when people say that a topic is confusing when I think it’s not, the reason is that there’s actually some hidden complexity that I wasn’t considering. And after some follow up conversations, it turned out that HEAD actually was a bit more complicated than I’d appreciated!”

featured in #496

Modern Git Commands And Features You Should Be Using

- Martin Heinz tl;dr: “Most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as add, commit, push or pull, like it's still 2005. Git however, introduced many features since then, and using them can make your life so much easier, so let's explore some of the recently added, modern git commands, that you should know about.” Martin presents Switch, Restore, Sparse Checkout, Worktree and Bisect. 

featured in #496

How I Use Git Worktrees

- Bill Mill tl;dr: “My favorite feature of git is one that not enough people know about: worktrees. Worktrees allow you to store branches of your repository in separate directories. This means you can switch branches by changing directory, instead of switching between branches in the same directory with git checkout or git switch. I've never seen anybody describe using worktrees quite the way I do, so I thought I'd write out how I like to work with them.”

featured in #495

Popular Git Config Options

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “I always wish that command line tools came with data about how popular their various options are, like: (1) “basically nobody uses this one”. (2) “80% of people use this, probably take a look”. (3) “this one has 6 possible values but people only really use these 2 in practice.” Julia asked about people’s favourite git config options and shares the responses.  

featured in #490

Git Tips And Tricks

- Scott Chacon tl;dr: “I’m going to write 3 short articles on some interesting Git things for intermediate to advanced Git users that you may not know, either because they just never came up or because they're pretty new and you've been using Git the same way for years. The topics are: (1) Oldies but goodies. (2) Some subtle new things. (3) Really large repositories and monorepos.”

featured in #489