When I asked for suggestions about note-taking apps back in May I wasn’t fully convinced I’d be able to stick with it, but nearly 6 months later it has probably been the thing I’ve been most consistent about. Anyways, here’s a rather short list of Git things off the ‘TIL’ list in my Logseq graph. I’ll keep adding new things to the top as they come up.

GIT_EDITOR variable

While Git will usually pick the $EDITOR environment variable to present an edit UI for commit messages and rebase to-dos, it also supports its own $GIT_EDITOR variable that can be used to set a Git-specific editor. This functionality can be leveraged from integrated terminals inside IDEs to allow writing commit message from the IDE without having to use their entire Git UI.

git add

  • git add -u will stage changes to all tracked files and leave untracked ones alone.
  • git add -N will stage a file without any of its changes. You can treat that as an “intention” to create a file as well as making it easier to use git diff to see what is being added without needing the --cached flag every time.

Git submodules

Probably the biggest pain in the ass in all of Git land. Every time I’ve had to use a submodule, I’ve disliked the experience. Here’s how to properly get rid of a submodule in case you’re switching to git-subrepo or a different solution.

git submodule deinit -f path/to/module
rm -rf .git/modules/path/to/module
git config -f .gitmodules --remove-section submodule.path/to/module
git add .gitmodules
git rm --cached path/to/module

In order, this

  1. deinit removes the checkout of the submodule and removes it from .git/config
  2. Deletes the bare repository Git creates of the submodule which is used to generate the actual checkout
  3. Edits your .gitmodules file to remove the submodule entry
  4. Stages the changes to .gitmodules
  5. Deletes the submodule fully from the index

At this point you can commit the changes and hopefully never deal with a submodule again :D

Git credential helpers

While trying to configure pass-git-helper to authenticate with my personal Git forge I ended up learning a bit about how Git interacts with credential helpers

Git credential helpers work via writing and reading from stdin and stdout which helped me debug an issue I was having with pass-git-helper. To get a credential helper to spit out the password, it needs to be called with get as the first argument and pass in some basic key=value data. The interaction looks somewhat like given below, with < indicating the stdin of the credential helper and > indicating its stdout.

# for URL https://git.msfjarvis.dev/msfjarvis/super-private
$ pass-git-helper get
< protocol=https
< host=git.msfjarvis.dev
< path=msfjarvis/super-private
> protocol=https
> host=git.msfjarvis.dev
> username=msfjarvis
> password=hunter2