Archives for July 2016

Git supports auto-completion when used via the terminal, which includes all basic commands such as git status or git checkout as well as local and remote branch names etc.

It comes pre-installed on Ubuntu, but a few simple steps (bellow) have to be followed to get it working on Mac.

1. Open up your terminal app
2. Go to your home folder cd ~
3. Download git completion source file from the official git repo curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash. Note: if this link goes dead, just google for the file name git-completion.bash and you should be able to find the updated link.
4. Open your ~/.bash_profile file (on Mac) or ~/.bashrc file (on other platforms) with your favorite text editor. i.e. vim ~/.bash_profile
5. Add the following line at the bottom of the file source ~/git-completion.bash and save the file.
6. Close and re-open your terminal or run . ~/.bash_profile to re-load your setting.
7. You should now have working git autocompletion in your terminal shell.

I initially learned this tip from Git Book, which I highly recommend to any new or intermediate Git users. You may also like my other posts on git – Git Cheatsheet and 19 Tips for Everyday Git Use.

Please let me know in the comment area if you run into any issues.

I tried shell integration for iterm2 and I didn’t like it.

I wasn’t sure how to remove it, so I looked into the install script.

I am currently using bash, so all they did was to add an entry into my ~/.bash_profile file and download a ~/.iterm2_shell_integration.bash file.

All I had to do, is remove the ~/.iterm2_shell_integration.bash file, and remove this line test -e "${HOME}/.iterm2_shell_integration.bash" && source "${HOME}/.iterm2_shell_integration.bash" from my ~/.bash_profile

If you are tech savvy enough to use other shells, you should be able to figure out from the script above what file to remove and which entry to remove from your shell config file.