Print the underlying command whenever you run a Git alias

In a recent pair programming session, someone mentioned that it was a little hard to follow my command line workflow due to my regular use of Git aliases. As someone who enjoys pair programming, I decided to take that feedback to heart and figure out a way to make the experience better for my future pairing partners. I landed on a solution that prints the underlying command of a Git alias any time I run one.

Imagine you have an alias called git l that logs the last 3 lines of your git log output in a custom format. The configuration for such an alias might look something like this.

# ~/.gitconfig[alias]  l = log --graph --oneline --max-count 3

$ git l* 9f363ea (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD) Fix publish timestamp* 54e7287 Add TIL series, update design, other improvements* f235f4f Add support for comments with Giscus

As you can see, the underlying command is obscured by the alias, so a third-party observer could only reason about what is actually happening by examining the output. All hope is not lost though.

Since an alias can invoke an external command with the ! character, we can rewrite our aliases to take advantage of the Bash set builtin. According to the docs, any single-character set option can be used when invoking the shell. This feature, along with the behavior of the set -v option, makes for a concise solution to our problem.

# ~/.gitconfig[alias]  l = !bash -v -c 'git log --graph --oneline --max-count 3'

$ git lgit log --graph --oneline --max-count 3 # <- the underlying command* 9f363ea (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD) Fix publish timestamp* 54e7287 Add TIL series, update design, other improvements* f235f4f Add support for comments with Giscus

If you found this post useful, have a question, or just want to say hi, please leave a comment down below. Thanks for reading, and happy coding. ✌️