What the heck am I pushing, anyways?

Blake Winton

2011-12-08 13:04

Much of the new work I’m doing these days is being stored in git repositories. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of git, particularly its UI, but the advantages of GitHub and GitX are hard to ignore. Despite that, I still really missed being able to type hg out to see which patches I would be pushing, so, after a short chat with (and demo from) Ben, I came up with the following:

Somewhere in your path, add a file named git-outgoing which contains the following contents:

# !/bin/sh
# Uh, there shouldn’t be a space between the # and ! in the previous
# line, but the highlighter I’m using seems to require it…
git push --dry-run $1 2&gt;&amp;1 | awk '/^ / {print $1}' | xargs git log

(Make sure it’s executable by whomever needs to use it!)

Then, in your git config, add the following section:

[alias]
    out = outgoing

And finally, you should be able to type git out, and see something like:

commit 7d4c9b89a4663a07bed030669bae2d3c73ec78dc
Author: Blake Winton &lt;bwinton@latte.ca&gt;
Date:   Thu Dec 8 12:22:41 2011 -0500

    Blear 2

commit a4e8c6627bc26d7371fb2614a1c47aaf694957bd
Author: Blake Winton &lt;bwinton@latte.ca&gt;
Date:   Thu Dec 8 12:18:04 2011 -0500

    Bleah.

So, hopefully some of the rest of you will find this helpful, too, and if you know of a better way to do this, please let me know in the comments!