Here are some of the Git alias configurations that I use. My philosophy in writing them was to keep them descriptive, and not to keep them easy to type, following the approach in this blog post. In order to keep my typing short, I use the fish shell.

[alias]
	amend = commit --amend
	discard = checkout --
	docommit = commit --verbose --all
	hist = log --color --pretty=format:\"%C(yellow)%h%C(reset) %s%C(bold red)%d%C(reset) %C(green)%ad%C(reset) %C(blue)[%an]%C(reset)\" --relative-date --decorate
	lastedit = log --pretty=format: --name-only -n 1
	logshort = log --oneline -n 10
    lsmodified = diff --name-only head
	mkbranch = checkout -b
	rmbranch = branch -d

The aliases amend and discard are pretty self-explanatory. docommit reflects my own preferences when finishing a commit: just commit everything that is currently modified and add a diff under the commit message, so that I can review what I actually modified everywhere. hist is something I don’t use very much; I copied it from somewhere and I keep it around to avoid going to a GUI when I need to review history in-depth.

lastedit lists which files were edited in the last commit. I find it useful to just open them again in an editor:

$ vim (git lastedit)

logshort is probably the alias I use the most. It just gives me an idea of what was going on in a branch, without defaulting to show me all history since the beginning of time. lsmodified is a recent addition. It lists all files modified but not commited. It is intended to be used together with other aliases:

$ git discard (git lsmodified)

mkbranch and rmbranch are also quite useful to me. I tend to see Git as a file system: sometimes I start to type ls -l when I actually need git status. In that mindset, I tend to identify branches with directories, and therefore creating and deleting them as if they were directories makes sense.