git organized (part I)

2023-12-06 . 1198 words . 6 min

Git is core part of my daily workflow (work or otherwise) and there are far too many ideas stash-ed in my head which can either (a) improve hygiene or (b) increase productivity.

folders, aliases and visual feedback

Before today, I organized all repositories in freedesktop.org xdg-user-dirs(1)¹ inspired $HOME/code folder for both personal and work repos. I can't trace back why I do so but I would thank my past self to not organize folders aggressively and follow a convention (even without knowing it too well).

One of the things that ick-ed about above method was work and personal repos mixed together in one folder. I'm easily distracted and all repos in one directory meant I would randomly pick a repo to explore and work on when I remember idea#53 can make something better in it. Another disadvantage was each repository had to be locally configured for separation of personal and work email for commits.

For the first improvement, I separated work and personal repos with below structure.

~/code/
├── git.sr.ht
│  └── hrmnjt           # root for personal SourceHut repos
│     ├── dotfiles
│     └── sttp
└── github.com
   ├── hrmnjt           # root for personal Github repos
   │  ├── resume
   │  └── x
   └── maf              # root for work Github repos
      ├── acme1
      └── acme2

One challenge that I came across this structure is that I need to type a lot more to navigate to a code repository. This works a bit to activate "slow thinking" for me. To make it easy though, I added a few zsh aliases which help me navigate to these folders quickly from anywhere.

alias ops="cd ~/code/git.sr.ht/hrmnjt/"
alias opg="cd ~/code/github.com/hrmnjt/"
alias opm="cd ~/code/github.com/maf/"

separation of concerns

As I mentioned above, work and personal repos required me to create local .gitconfig files which would specify user.email and user.name values. Scaffolding for a new project would involve setting these configurations for new repository which added to number of things I need to care for. Folder structure solved this problem for me as I created 2 separate global gitconfigs and used conditional includes to assume email and name values for each repos.

Config for personal repos looks like follows.

# ~/.config/git/config.personal

[user]
    name = Harmanjeet Singh
    email = [email protected]

Config for work repos looks like follows.

# ~/.config/git/config.work

[user]
    name = Harmanjeet Singh
    email = [email protected]

Conditional includes for gitconfig depending on folders

# ~/.config/git/config

# `user.name` and `user.email` import for work configuration
[includeIf "gitdir:~/code/github.com/maf/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/config.maf

# `user.name` and `user.email` import for personal configuration
[includeIf "gitdir:~/code/github.com/hrmnjt/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/config.hrmnjt

# `user.name` and `user.email` import for personal configuration
[includeIf "gitdir:~/code/git.sr.ht/hrmnjt/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/config.hrmnjt

Based on this commits for all repos work with suitable and correct email and name depending on context of organization.

no more .DS_Store, please

One another item in the list of cognitive load to scaffold a new repo is to add a .gitignore which always requires to remove a few folders and files e.g. MacOS .DS_Store, Vim swp files, node_modules and Python venvs.

Now I have a global .gitignore configured in gitconfig which can be used to exclude above unwanted but necessary files/folders from being tracked by git.

# ~/.config/git/config

[core]
  excludesFile = ~/.gitignore

init sr.ht migration

One of the long pending action that I wanted to do was to migrate to SourceHut and keep repo mirrored on Github for reference and reach. I like SourceHut over Github for everything {speed, interface, automation, privacy}. Only reason I want to keep Github mirrors for my project is for reach and community that is already existing on Github.

As of today, I've begun experimentation with couple of repos having primary remotes on sr.ht and mirrors on Github. I will evaluate the experience and do this for all repos eventually.

Process I followed to make changes for sttp was as follows

$ git remote -v
# origin	[email protected]:hrmnjt/sttp.git (fetch)
# origin	[email protected]:hrmnjt/sttp.git (push)

$ git remote remove origin

$ git remote add origin [email protected]:~hrmnjt/sttp

$ git remote set-url --add origin [email protected]:hrmnjt/sttp.git

$ git remote -v
# origin	[email protected]:~hrmnjt/sttp (fetch)
# origin	[email protected]:~hrmnjt/sttp (push)
# origin	[email protected]:hrmnjt/sttp.git (push)

With this configuration, when I push any branch to origin it pushes it to both the remote repositories. I wonder if there is any other efficient/cheaper approach to do this.

aliases

There are a few git operations that I do a lot more than others and if I can do the same with typing less it is amazing. I've the following aliases configured as zsh alias as well as git aliases.

[alias]
    co = checkout
    aa = add --all
    cmsg = commit -m
    st = status
    l = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

    # Show all of my configured aliases
    aliases = !git config --list | grep 'alias\\.'

With this configuration, typing git st (git alias) or gst (zsh alias), I can understand git status with at least 50% lesser keystrokes.

general "quality of life" stuff

In addition to the other improvement which are directly for git workflow, there are some general improvements which I could find time for and they are providing instant gratification to the chaos monkey in my head.

First one is using Powerlevel10k² instead of starship.rs³ as shell prompt. Starship was slow but provided similar value. Powerlevel10k is super fast and gets the terminal ready to use instantly. It adds succinct symbols to prompt making it super easy to understand the state of working directory.

Second, replacing exa with ls(1) provides a --git flag which can list all the files in a directory with their git status indicator⁴. I've added an alias to replace and configure exa to my liking

alias ls="exa"
alias l="exa --long --tree --level=1 --time-style=long-iso --group-directories-first --git --all"

And below is how prompt and exa works right now.

concluding

It has been very satisfying to make these changes. I hope I like them and they make me 1% better tomorrow. Only time will tell!

Update (2024-02-18)
These changes were amazing for my local git workflow especially the folder setup and listening to FOSDEM talk from Scott Chacon I added a few more nifty changes to git workflow; wrote about them in git more organized

footnotes