Git

Did a quick screencast with some coworkers today on the latest thing I love about Github. Last time, I covered how to create pull requests. This time, I explain how to create a pull request out of an existing issue. Since pull requests are basically just issues with commits attached, it's often undesirable to create a new pull request to address something reported in an existing issue, because you just wind up with two issues that address the same thing.

There isn't a way to do this through the Github interface, but the hub command line tool adds some special sauce for working with Github, and the thing I use it for most is opening pull requests for issues.

The quality is crummy, so turn up the quality to 480p.

If your company is hosting code in Github, I sure hope you aren't committing directly to master. This quick screencast demonstrates how to use pull requests so that teammates can review code before it gets merged into the master branch.

Make sure you turn on HD so that the text is legible.

I've been meaning to write something up about these for a while, because they have made my development flow so much better.

Tab completion

Arguably, the best thing about git is lightweight branches. But, I had been resisting using them, because it was a pain in the neck to keep track of them and re-type or copy-pasta the name for every checkout or merge. I rely heavily on tab completion in the command line, because I know I'll mistype things otherwise, and spend way too much time trying to figure out why something is broke later on - for example, after mistyping the target of a symlink.

As it turns out, git ships with a script to handle tab completion: you just need to find and enable it.

Since I use Homebrew to install and update packages (Mac users: you should too), my git executable is in /usr/local/Cellar/git/1.7.3.4/bin. You need to find git-completion.bash. In my case, it's in a sibling directory: /usr/local/Cellar/git/1.7.3.4/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash.