Re: git alias and --help

From: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
Date: Oct 28, 2011, 01:51 UTC
Message-ID: <buoty6t9937.fsf@dhlpc061.dev.necel.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v8vo6xd4u.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

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

Show 7 quoted lines

>>> git branch --help
>>
>> How about "git help branch"?
>
> The reason why we do not do what you seem to be suggesting is because
> giving the same behaviour to "git b --help" as "git branch --help" is
> wrong.

I agree with Gelonida's followup: although what you say makes sense, it's still pretty annoying behavior for the very common case of a simple renaming alias...

E.g., I have "co" aliased to "checkout", and so my fingers are very very inclined to say "co" when I mean checkout... including when asking for help. I actually end up typing "git co --help", grumbling, and retyping with the full command name, quite reguarly.

What I've often wished is that git's help system would output something like:

   $ git help co
   `git co' is aliased to `checkout'

   Here's the help entry for `checkout':

   GIT-CHECKOUT(1)                   Git Manual                   GIT-CHECKOUT(1)

   NAME
          git-checkout - Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree
   ...

[with the "`git co' is aliased ..." header included in the pager output.]

Of course, that would be the wrong thing for somebody that just wants to be reminded what an alias expands too, but my intuition is that this is a very tiny minority compared to people that want to examine the options for the underlying command...

-Miles

-- 
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.