Config files

See also:

• Git config in my dotfiles repo.
• Git configuration in the Git docs.

Commit message editor

If you prefer to use another editor rather than vim (default on macOS and Linux) when doing git commit.

More info - see Git Commands - setup and config in the Git docs.

Nano

[core]
	editor = "nano -w"

Or

$ git config --global core.editor "nano -w"

VS Code

[core]
	editor = "code --wait"

Or

$ git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

Diff tool

Git uses vimdiff by default.

Usage:

$ git difftool
$ # OR
$ git difftool COMMIT_REF^ COMMIT_REF

Help:

$ git difftool --tool-help

Set up VS Code as your diff tool based on SO:

[diff]
    tool = default-difftool
    
[difftool "default-difftool"]
    cmd = code --wait --diff $LOCAL $REMOTE

Aliases

• Git aliases cheatsheet.

Commit template

$ git config --global commit.template _COMMIT_MESSAGE

[commit]
        template = "_COMMIT_MESSAGE"

Make sure you have _COMMIT_MESSAGE as a text file in your repo. I also recommend making a global ignore file that ignores _COMMIT_MESSAGE and have your git config aware of that ~/.gitignore file.

See my Tutorial on this for more details steps.

Default branch

Git still uses master as the default, while GitHub uses main.

Set this up so git init for a new repo will start you out with main.

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

[init]
	defaultBranch = "main"

Configure merge strategy for pull

About

In some situations, you do want a merge commit such as pulling a feature branch into master (if you want to do this on the CLI for some reason rather than PR Merge button). And sometimes you don’t want a commit and you just want to rebase the current branch on the remote or on the remote master. The sections below help with these.

Defaults

The git pull default behavior is with --ff.

You can set --no-ff or --ff-only using flags to config options.

Warning

If your pull strategy is not configured, newer versions of git will now give this warning running git pull:

Warning message

warning: Pulling without specifying how to reconcile divergent branches is discouraged. You can squelch this message by running one of the following commands sometime before your next pull: git config pull.rebase false # merge (the default strategy) git config pull.rebase true # rebase git config pull.ff only # fast-forward only You can replace "git config" with "git config --global" to set a default preference for all repositories. You can also pass --rebase, --no-rebase, or --ff-only on the command line to override the configured default per invocation.

So here are your options for .gitconfig under [pull] heading.

Note lack of quotes on true and false.

Merge approach

[pull]
    rebase = false

This is the default behavior that we are used to, but now configure explicitly as a strategy in the config.

Running git pull will create a merge commit if there are remote upstream changes. This commit probably not desirable when working on a feature branch.

So you could set this option explicitly in your config to get the warning to disappear - and then use git pull --rebase manually when you do want to rebase.

Rebase approach

[pull]
    rebase = true

This means that git pull effectively does this:

$ git pull --rebase

This is probably what you want and generally safe to do often. You rebase local unpushed changed, pulling in the remote changes.

The problem is that when setting the config as above, the pull will fail if there are any uncommitted changes. This can be annoying when you know you have nothing to rebase and just want to do a plain git pull.

Fast-forward approach

[pull]
    ff = "only"

This approach will attempt to do a git pull to get the branch up to date with the remote and fast-forward if possible. Equivalent to:

$ git pull --ff-only
# ...
fatal: Not possible to fast-forward, aborting.

If there are remote changes, if will fail.

Then you can run this to deliberately choose a rebase.

$ git pull --rebase

If you do want a merge commit, could run this after.

$ git merge

As you’ve already done the git fetch with the pull. So now this will merge origin/master into master, or the equivalent pair for the branch you’re on.

Generated message:

Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/origin/master' into master

However, you may want to be more explict with your merge. Such as if you do git pull origin my-feature then git merge probably needs to be git merge origin/my-feature.

Alternatively, you can do this to pull and merge in one move, avoiding the error. Maybe as an alias.

$ git pull origin my-feature && git merge origin/my-feature