Git is a tool that I use almost every day as a developer. It allows me to confidently make changes to my code and not worry about remembering what changes I made and when. On a team it also allows me to work concurrently with other developers and sanely pull our work together into a single code stream without going crazy.
While I’ve used Git for quite some time now, I admit that I often find myself Googling for that one command that I can’t seem to care enough to remember but always find myself needing to use. If you’re familiar with the Google workflow, you might not think it takes up that much time. After all being able to Google well is like a necessity as a developer.
Without giving it much thought your Google workflow might look like this:
- Open up a browser
- Click into the URL bar
- Type in the Git command description into the bar to search
- Look over the list of results to decipher which of the results looks promising
- Click on a link to look at search result
- Read content of page
- If unsatisfied, click the back button
- Search for next viable result
- Repeat until you find the command you’re looking for
- Copy command into your clipboard
- Paste command into your terminal and hit enter to execute
While the entire process might take a few minutes, those minutes could add up over time. Time instead which could be used solving a coding problem.
Frustrated at how much time I was losing on Googling the Git commands, I decided to compile the most commonly used Git commands into a nice, simple and clean Git cheat sheet.
So now my Git workflow looks like this:
- Double click PDF on desktop
- Look for header of the type of Git interaction I’m looking to execute
- Scan list of commands, find the one that I need
- Copy command into clipboard
- Paste command into terminal and hit enter to execute
That’s less than half the amount of steps it takes to Google for the same command.
Not only do cheat sheets save you time, they look pretty nice too.
- Comes in four color variations based off of popular editor syntax themes, Atom’s One light and dark theme, Wes Bos’ Cobolt2 and Sailorhg’s Fairy Floss
- Uses Fira Mono for commands
- Copy and pastable from PDF to command line
The type of commands which are covered in the Git cheat sheets are:
- Configuration variables
- Creating repositories
- File related commands
- Branch
- Merge & rebase
- Logs
- Clean up
- Tags
- Stashes
If you’d like to save time with your Git workflow with these Git cheat sheets, you can buy them here. If you’d like to get a free copy of the One light version of the Git cheat sheet, sign up for my newsletter.