config/alias.txt: document alias accepting non-command first word
One can see that an alias that begins with a non-command first word, such as `loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase`, is permitted. However, this isn't immediately obvious to users as alias instances typically begin with a command. Document the fact that an alias can begin with a non-command first word so that users will be able to discover that this is a feature. Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Denton Liu committed
Jun 5, 2019 at 16:10 UTC
459842e1c2777812130545dc52753c6f4d517e21
1 file changed
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Documentation/config/alias.txt
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@@ -7,6 +7,16 @@ alias.*::
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spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping is supported.
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A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.
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+
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+Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a
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+command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the
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+invocation of `git`. In particular, this is useful when used with `-c`
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+to pass in one-time configurations or `-p` to force pagination. For example,
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+`loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase` can be defined such that
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+running `git loud-rebase` would be equivalent to
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+`git -c commit.verbose=true rebase`. Also, `ps = -p status` would be a
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+helpful alias since `git ps` would paginate the output of `git status`
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+where the original command does not.
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++
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If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point,
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it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining
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`alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD`, the invocation