From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2012 20:34:19 GMT
Subject: Re: Support of '^' as alias for 'HEAD^'
Message-ID: <7vr4se5bg4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vzk725c86.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Stefan Näwe <stefan.naewe@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Zeeshan Ali (Khattak <zeeshanak <at> gnome.org> writes:
>>> 
>>> Many times I want to refer to 'HEAD^', 'HEAD^^' and sometimes even
>>> further up the tree. It would be really nice if I didn't have to type
>>> 'HEAD^' but could only type '^'. Bash completion make things easier
>>> but it automatically inserts a space immediately after HEAD so you
>>> have to hit backspace. I think this change would be good in general
>>> anyway.
>>
>> Or even '~1', '~3'.
>
> "^" has a problem when used with other things (does "log ^^2
> origin" mean "log HEAD^2..origin"?  Or "log HEAD^^2 origin"), so I
> do not think it would never fly as an abbreviated syntax.
>
> While I see your "~<N>" much distasteful compared to "^", you still

s/dist/less dist/; sorry ;-)

> need to be a bit more careful when analysing the benefit of such an
> abbreviation.  To shells used by many people, these mean tilde
> expansion ~<N> to refer to elements on the dirstack and you need to
> quote, perhaps like \~3.