Terminal Git Productivity

What you will learn

• Understand the core purpose of Terminal Git Productivity
• Master the basic usage and common options of Terminal Git Productivity
• Supercharge your terminal Git workflow with aliases, shell completion, lazygit, tig, delta diff viewer, git-prompt customization, and git-branchless.
• Understand key concepts: Git Aliases
• Know when to use this feature and when to avoid it

Start with a problem

Your team is adopting CI/CD pipelines, or you're configuring Git integration in your IDE — but you're unsure how Git behaves differently in automated environments compared to local manual operations.

One-Sentence Understanding

The terminal is Git's native habitat — with aliases, dedicated tools, and a customized prompt, you can accomplish in one keystroke what takes five commands in a GUI.

Git Aliases

[alias]
  st = status
  co = checkout
  br = branch
  ci = commit
  di = diff
  lg = log --oneline --graph --all --decorate
  aa = add --all
  unstage = reset HEAD --
  undo = reset --soft HEAD~1
  ri = rebase -i
  tree = log --all --graph --oneline --decorate
  cleanup = !git branch --merged main | grep -v \" main\" | xargs -r git branch -d
  lines = !git log --author=\"$(git config user.name)\" --pretty=tformat: --numstat | awk '{ add += $1; subs += $2; loc += $1 - $2 } END { printf \"added: %s, removed: %s, total: %s\", add, subs, loc }'

Shell Completion

Bash:

source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/git
export GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true

Zsh (oh-my-zsh):

plugins=(git gitfast)

Fish (built-in):

abbr -a gst 'git status'
abbr -a gco 'git checkout'
abbr -a glg 'git log --oneline --graph --all --decorate'

lazygit

brew install lazygit
cd my-project && lazygit

Set delta as pager: git.paging.pager: delta.

tig

brew install tig
tig            # Commit history
tig status     # Status view
tig blame file # Blame

delta — Enhanced Diff

[core]
  pager = delta
[delta]
  side-by-side = true
  line-numbers = true
  syntax-theme = Dracula

Features: syntax highlighting, side-by-side view, line numbers, navigation.

git-prompt

export GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1
export GIT_PS1_SHOWSTASHSTATE=1
export GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM="auto"
PS1='\w$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")\$ '

Or use starship:

[git_branch]
format = "on [$symbol$branch]($style) "
[git_status]
staged = "+\${count}"
modified = "!\${count}"

git-branchless

brew install git-branchless
git sl       # Smart commit graph
git undo     # Undo last operation
git restack  # Fix broken dependencies
git record   # Interactive stage & commit

Other Tools

Try it yourself

1. Practice the terminal-git-productivity command in a test repository and observe state changes before and after
2. Experiment with different options and compare the output differences
3. Simulate a real scenario where you would need to use this, and walk through the full process

Continue Learning

1. commands/git-config — Git configuration reference
2. commands/git-log — Advanced git log usage
3. best-practices/git-aliases — Git alias best practices