A list of cool features of Git and GitHub

[teamhappy]

> To add more color to your Git output: git config --global color.ui 1

Don't do this. The default (since 1.8.4) is auto, which adds colors if the output goes to a terminal, but doesn't if the output goes somewhere else (e.g., a pipe). That is probably what you want (and already have).

I fell for this myself at some point. Somehow expecting there to be more colors, or full color support, or something like that — Nope.

[sheetjs]

The book has a nice discussion: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configurat...

> The default setting is auto, which colors output when it’s going straight to a terminal, but omits the color-control codes when the output is redirected to a pipe or a file.

> You can also set it to always to ignore the difference between terminals and pipes. You’ll rarely want this; in most scenarios, if you want color codes in your redirected output, you can instead pass a --color flag to the Git command to force it to use color codes. The default setting is almost always what you’ll want.

[gabrielhn]

    git config --global --unset color.ui

[sergiotapia]

Better yet, if you just want to get to work and have a sexy terminal, use https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

To install on Mac just run:

    git clone https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles.git && cd dotfiles && source bootstrap.sh

[whizzkid]

File Explorer by pressing "t" is my favorite shortcut on Github since nested file structure gets annoying after a while of looking around.

[scotchio]

This has been posted a few times before and is an excellent resource.

It links to a GitHub repo [1] I made a while ago with every type of emoji as a separate file and commit as a fun and somewhat pointless demo.

However, for whatever reason the emojis on the repo stopped working (after a GitHub update?). Each emoji, regardless of commit message, is defaulting to the last one that was created (:zzz:). I reached out to GitHub a few times about it, but I never got a response. It's probably super low priority for them, but I thought I would share since, although minor, I technically broke GitHub.

[1] https://github.com/scotch-io/All-Github-Emoji-Icons

[ecaron]

Previous fruitful HN conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7580465

[returnofthejedi]

Github should definetely have more Emojis!

Emojis make everything a little bit fun.

[krat0sprakhar]

So you can have a web interface to browse your Git repo with just one command

  $ git instaweb

Wow! Git never ceases to amaze! http://git-scm.com/docs/git-instaweb

[talles]

> The first commit of a repo, as the first commit cannot be rebased later

Hey, can't I git rebase --root?

[ekimekim]

You can, but it's still a good idea to avoid as it tends to confuse some tools (and some people).

[sinkasapa]

One cool feature that isn't listed here is that you can use emacs org-mode files instead of markdown to document your project.

[nilved]

There are many different formats you can use: https://github.com/github/markup

[niutech]

Any way how to automatically mirror an external Git repo to GitHub? Any webhooks for that?

[talles]

https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/

tldr; you have to set the hook yourself

[bjeanes]

The feature does or did exist, but hidden. The early versions of GitHub Enterprise (called GitHub FI) exposed this and it can be seen in action in some places (e.g.: https://github.com/ghc; look at the "mirrored from" subtitles). I really wish GitHub would expose that feature publicly, though. The post-receive advice they give only works if you have full access to the master repo and misses out on recording the "this is a mirror" piece of metadata on the repository, which is useful for people who might try to open PRs etc

[allendoerfer]

The point of git is, that you do not need to do this. Just push.

[returnofthejedi]

Can't we download and then push to github repo?

[christop]

> Adding ?w=1 to any diff URL will remove any changes only in whitespace, enabling you to see only that code that has changed.

Annoyingly, this doesn't work for pull requests.

[oneeyedpigeon]

weirdly, an empty line is included in the example output. Does that not count as whitespace?