exgit

Extends the functionality of Git with some useful commands & shortcuts.

Description

This is a collection of custom commands & aliases for common Git workflow actions. They either add new functionality to the git command line (e.g.: GitHub-integrated features) or ease use of some common, yet tedious commands (like updating another branch).

The problem

Git has a lot of functionality, some of which isn't even in use by most users. Worse, some commands are very useful for that same group of people, but aren't accessible or overly-daunting.

For example, when most people want to merge with/rebase against master, they switch to it (git checkout), update it (git pull), switch back (git checkout) and merge/rebase. This gets worse if they have any uncommited changes that clash with master, and they can't really afford to commit them now because they're half-baked. So they git stash them, do the thing, and git stash pop them.

Those are a lot of commands, and the sheer amount tends to discourage people from using the CLI. Except, there's an easier option -- calling git fetch origin master:master. But it's not easily-accessible, nor is it obvious. To compensate, exgit offers the aptly-named alias, git update [remote] <branch>.

Another issue is force-pushing a branch. You force-push a branch by manually-specifying the source branch, destination branch & remote. (The branch name is specified to ensure only that branch is force-pushed, no matter the config) Even if the branch names are identical and it's for origin, you still have to run git push --force origin feature/add-very-important-functionality:feature/add-very-important-functionality. If your organization leads a policy of squashing or clean, semantic commits, this gets tedious -- fast.

Instead, exgit offers git pushf. This force-pushes the current branch to origin and also asks for confirmation before. (manually-specifying remotes will be supported later)

The solution

exgit aims to solve this problem with semantic, clear, obvious aliases for these actions. Like git update, or git pushf. As a bonus, it also comes with some workflow-supporting commands that aren't part of git, like git pull-request.

Requirements & OS Support

Every command is made to be cross-platform by being written as a shell script (for simple ones) or as a Python script (for more complicated, "enhanced" commands). However, PR-searching for git pull-request is currently only supported on Windows, due to making use of Windows' saved credential system (where querying for credentials doesn't require a username). This will later be supported on Mac & Linux.

tl;dr:

Git 2.0+
Python 2.7
- GitPython for all Python-based commands
- keyring for git-pull-request
Any OS that runs git
- Temporary: Windows-only for PR searches in git-pull-request (you can still create PRs, though)

Help

Documentation