Johannes Gilger
2.8 KiB
Advance GitX usage
While GitX can be used just fine without ever touching the terminal, some of it's power can currently only be used through the command line utility.
You can install this utility by choosing "Enable Terminal Usage…" from GitX's menu. This will ask you if GitX is allowed to install the gitx utility in /usr/local/bin. After you have done this, you can use gitx from the terminal in any Git repository!
To become familiar with this utility, you can read it's short help message:
Tirana:UserManual pieter$ gitx --help
Usage: gitx --help
or: gitx (--commit|-h)
or: gitx <revlist options>
-h, --help print this help
--commit, -c start GitX in commit mode
RevList options
See 'man git-log' and 'man git-rev-list' for options you can pass to gitx
--all show all branches
<branch> show specific branch
-- <path> show commits touching paths
As you can see already, gitx has some useful options. To quickly start committing, use gitx -c.
However, to really make use of all the options, you should read the git-log and git-rev-list man-pages. Gitx takes most of the commands that normal git utilities also take.
For example, if you want to show commits that change lines with the word 'cool' in it, you can use:
gitx -Scool
and to see commands that touch only files in the "Documentation" directory, you can use
gitx -- Documentation
You can also specify which branches gitx should display, for example:
gitx commit_view log_options --grep="fix" --author=Pieter
will show all commits in the commit_view and log_options branches that have the word 'fix' in their commit message and which are committed by Pieter.
If you have a lot of commits, you can choose to limit the output. For example,
gitx -1000
will only show the first 1000 commits. Limiting commits can be useful in other contexts too. For example, if you want to know what you have committed that isn't on the remote yet, you can use
gitx origin/master..
If there are changes both on a remote and on your local side, you can show them at once with the symmetric set difference:
gitx --left-right origin/master...HEAD
will show commits that are only on your side OR only on the remote side. The --left-right options does some other magic: instead of the usual circles GitX uses in the branch lines, it will now use an arrow pointing left for commits only on the left side (that is, in origin/master), and an arrow to the right for commits only on the right side. For example, when I issued the same command on this repository, I got:
You can also pipe any command that produces a diff to GitX to see its changes. For example, to compare version 0.5 and version 0.6 of GitX, you can do the following:
git diff v0.5 v0.6 | gitx