This how I setup my Git configuration on a Mac M1 device with Zsh. A reference for my future self.

Since switching to an Mac M1 device earlier this year my old dotfiles didn't work anymore. Apart from X86 => Arm, Mac OS also ships with Zsh as the default shell instead of Bash since a while back. Instead of attempting to migrate my entire setup I decided to use a vanilla configuration for a few months to really identify the annoynances of my daily git usage. Here's what I ended up really missing:

User configuration

Like many, I use the same device at my job, as I do for working on personal and open source projects. For the latter, I want to use my personal credentials when doing git commits.

I use a .gitconfig file in ~ together with a .gitconfig-work and a .gitconfig-personal to fix this.

# .gitconfig
[includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/personal/"]
  path = .gitconfig-personal
[includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/work/"]
  path = .gitconfig-work

# .gitconfig-personal
[user]
  name = Daniel
  email = daniel@my-personal-email.com

# .gitconfig-work
[user]
  name = Daniel
  email = daniel@my-work-email.com

To verify that you've set it up correctly. Go into a git repository and type git config user.email to verify the right user is configured for the present working directory.

Aliases

In my .zshrc i a few simple git aliases, but that I type atleast 100 times per day:

alias gs="git status"
alias gb="git branch"
alias gc="git checkout"

What's nice about aliases is that you can still pass arguments that you would normally do. For example gc -b new-branch

I don't commit, push, pull or rebase as offen so I usually leave those as is.

Pushing new branches to origin

This is by far my favorite shortuct. If you're like me, you create a lot of branches locally, and then you want to push them to something like GitHub, typing git push will yield the following error:

fatal: The current branch my-new-branch has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use
    git push --set-upstream origin my-new-branch

Instead of copy pasting the above (which i used to do all the time), I now have a alias named gpo that does the following:

alias gpo="git push -u origin HEAD"

Edit (2024-05-21): This can now also be set to happen automatically with the push.autoSetupRemote git configuration flag.

You can set it by running git config --global --add --bool push.autoSetupRemote true in your CLI.

Minor Zsh improvements

Prompt

The standard prompt looks something like this. Not very helpful.

daniel@Daniels-Mac some-project-dir %

With a few lines of configuration in .zshrc

autoload -Uz vcs_info
precmd_vcs_info() { vcs_info }
precmd_functions+=( precmd_vcs_info )
setopt prompt_subst
zstyle ':vcs_info:git:* ' formats '%b '
PROMPT='%B%F{240}%1~%f%b $vcs_info_msg_0_➟'

We can make it show the current git branch (main in this example) if inside a folder with a git repository.

some-dir ➟
cd some-project-dir
some-project-dir main ➟

Atleast that saves my typing gb 50 times less a day :D

Autocompletion

I used to think this required a big old bash script to work, but it turns out it's as easy as enabling Zsh's built in Completion system

autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

And you're done. Magic.

But what about "x" ?

The tweaks in this article adressed the things that annoyed me the most after using git for a few months without any configuration.

I know there are a million things to configure with git but I tend to stick with a simple setup these days :)