At a new job my coworkers flamed me for not having git bash-completion in my terminal (Lol, really though). Well, they could have asked me in a nicer way hehe, but I shall still be thanking them for helping me to make my command line even more awesome! By the way, I added git bash-completion as a step in my ultimate pretty command line guide which you should definitely check out if you haven't already, but this post is specifically about git bash-completion and why you should use it, and I hope by the end of it you have git bash-completion installed in your terminal too! 😉
Why?
Especially when you work on a team that likes to user super long git branch names **cough cough**, but even when you don't it gets pretty annoying typing out your branch names every time and not getting any auto-completion help the way you do with linux commands like "cd". Well, actually that is a thing, it's called "git bash-completion", and it's actually pretty easy to set up! So, you should do get it! 😊
Confession: I have spent years working on the command line typing out branch names without git branch-completion, and sometimes I shed a few tears at night wishing I could get some of those keystrokes back. Sign. So, don't make that same mistake I did, and if you already then have hten at least don't continue making it! Install git bash-completion today! (I'm not a salesperson for git bash-completion, I swear!)
Install
So before you can use git bash-completion you need to install it- seems like a logical prerequisite, eh? My favorite way to install it is through brew:
brew install git bash-completion
Just in case this command fails, if you are on linux/window, or maybe you just have something against brew and want to use macports, there is a great first answer on this stack overflow question that should get you going in the right direction.
Add To .bash_profile
Edit your "~/.bash_profile" file (or create it if you don't have one) and add this single line to get git bash-completion going:
source /usr/local/git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash
That's it, and now you should have git bash-completion! Remember that you'll need to run "source ~/.bash_profile" or just boot up a new terminal window to see the changes to your .bash_profile reflected!
Go Crazy!
Now that you have git bash-completion don't forget to use it all the time and wow all your friends who don't yet know about it!
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