I love scouring the release notes of my favorite tools for hidden (or not so hidden) gems. It’s a little bit like Christmas every time. I get that nice feeling of anticipation and curiosity when new versions are released of my faithful OSX open source window manager Slate, on Rails, Django, CoffeeScript and of course Git and many others.
Upgrading, upgrading, upgrading
So the new Git 1.8.2 release is out. Of course this means upgrading to the latest version. It should be relatively pain free:
- Just type brew update && brew upgrade git if you use homebrew on OSX.
- Use a magic apt trick if on Ubuntu based distributions (I leave other distributions as an exercise for the reader).
- Simply run the new installer if on Windows.
So what’s new in Git 1.8.2?
As usual, a lot has been fixed. A few specific things caught my interest in this latest release.
Streamlined behavior for add -u and -A
git add -u is the flag used to tell Git to also stage deletions when adding stuff from the current directory to the index.
And git add -A is used to add everything and stage deletions starting from the current directory. It used to be equivalent to:
git add .; git add -u
This behavior has now changed and -u/-A flags will operate on the entire source tree to make it consistent with git commit -a and others that already work this way. This is a backwards incompatible change, though hopefully of light impact.
Useful **/ pattern to use in .gitignore
The beloved .gitignore file gains a cool new **/ pattern that matches zero or more levels of a subdirectory:
E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a
subdirectory of "foo".
In addition to this, Git now sports a check-ignore command that can be used to debug the .gitignore settings:
E.g.
[4967] λ # git check-ignore --verbose dist/
.gitignore:1:dist dist/
Improved completion script
If you use the command line and have setup git shell auto completion you have probably noticed how useful it is. In this release the completion script has been improved to be smart about which files to show when you git add, discarding not relevant ones like unmodified paths.
Colored Aliases And Script Interactions
I use heavily colored log commands as I showed in my alias post a while ago. This release brings in a nice tweak that automatically disables colors when the output is not used for a terminal, very useful when using Git commands in scripts.
How do you use it? Just pre-pend auto to the color specifier like:
%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)
Ancestry graph in git log now works with combined diff output
The --graph output of git log used to struggle if you added the -p to show the combined diff output. Now it works as expected:
git log -p --cc --graph
Better Sync Status Between Local and Remote Branches
This is actually something from the 1.8.1 release but neat nonetheless:
When “git checkout” checks out a branch, it tells the user how far
behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking
branch it builds upon. The message now also advises how to sync
them up by pushing or pulling. This can be disabled with the
advice.statusHints configuration variable.