Rasmus VillemoesI often use 'git <cmd> --help' as a quick way to get the documentation for a command. However, I've also trained my muscle memory to use my aliases (cp=cherry-pick, co=checkout etc.), which means that I often end up doing
git cp --help
to which git correctly informs me that cp is an alias for cherry-pick. However, I already knew that, and what I really wanted was the man page for the cherry-pick command.
This introduces a help.followAlias config option that transparently redirects to (the first word of) the alias text (provided of course it is not a shell command), similar to the option for autocorrect of misspelled commands.
The documentation in config.txt could probably be improved. Also, I mimicked the autocorrect case in that the "Continuing to ..." text goes to stderr, but because of that, I also print the "is aliased to" text to stderr, which is different from the current behaviour of using stdout. I'm not sure what the most correct thing is, but I assume --help is mostly used interactively with stdout and stderr pointing at the same place.
Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <rv@rasmusvillemoes.dk> --- Documentation/config.txt | 10 ++++++++++ builtin/help.c | 36 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--- 2 files changed, 43 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
Show changes to 2 files +43 −3
Documentation/config.txt, builtin/help.c
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt index ad0f4510c3..8a1fc8064e 100644 --- a/Documentation/config.txt +++ b/Documentation/config.txt @@ -2105,6 +2105,16 @@ help.autoCorrect:: value is 0 - the command will be just shown but not executed. This is the default. +help.followAlias:: + When requesting help for an alias, git prints a line of the + form "'<alias>' is aliased to '<string>'". If this option is + set to a positive integer, git proceeds to show the help for + the first word of <string> after the given number of + deciseconds. If the value of this option is negative, the + redirect happens immediately. If the value is 0 (which is the + default), or <string> begins with an exclamation point, no + redirect takes place. + help.htmlPath:: Specify the path where the HTML documentation resides. File system paths and URLs are supported. HTML pages will be prefixed with this path when diff --git a/builtin/help.c b/builtin/help.c index 8d4f6dd301..ef1c3f0916 100644 --- a/builtin/help.c +++ b/builtin/help.c @@ -34,6 +34,7 @@ enum help_format { }; static const char *html_path; +static int follow_alias; static int show_all = 0; static int show_guides = 0; @@ -273,6 +274,10 @@ static int git_help_config(const char *var, const char *value, void *cb) html_path = xstrdup(value); return 0; } + if (!strcmp(var, "help.followalias")) { + follow_alias = git_config_int(var, value); + return 0; + } if (!strcmp(var, "man.viewer")) { if (!value) return config_error_nonbool(var); @@ -415,9 +420,34 @@ static const char *check_git_cmd(const char* cmd) alias = alias_lookup(cmd); if (alias) { - printf_ln(_("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"), cmd, alias); - free(alias); - exit(0); + const char **argv; + int count; + + if (!follow_alias || alias[0] == '!') { + printf_ln(_("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"), cmd, alias); + free(alias); + exit(0); + } + fprintf_ln(stderr, _("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"), cmd, alias); + + /* + * We use split_cmdline() to get the first word of the + * alias, to ensure that we use the same rules as when + * the alias is actually used. split_cmdline() + * modifies alias in-place. + */ + count = split_cmdline(alias, &argv); + if (count < 0) + die("Bad alias.%s string: %s", cmd, + split_cmdline_strerror(count)); + + if (follow_alias > 0) { + fprintf_ln(stderr, + _("Continuing to help for %s in %0.1f seconds."), + alias, follow_alias/10.0); + sleep_millisec(follow_alias * 100); + } + return alias; } if (exclude_guides)
-- 2.16.4
