I often use 'git <cmd> --help' as a quick way to get the documentation
for a command. However, I've also trained my muscle memory to use my
aliases (cp=cherry-pick, co=checkout etc.), which means that I often end
up doing
git cp --help
to which git correctly informs me that cp is an alias for
cherry-pick. However, I already knew that, and what I really wanted was
the man page for the cherry-pick command.
This introduces a help.followAlias config option that transparently
redirects to (the first word of) the alias text (provided of course it
is not a shell command), similar to the option for autocorrect of
misspelled commands.
The documentation in config.txt could probably be improved. Also, I
mimicked the autocorrect case in that the "Continuing to ..." text goes
to stderr, but because of that, I also print the "is aliased to" text to
stderr, which is different from the current behaviour of using
stdout. I'm not sure what the most correct thing is, but I assume --help
is mostly used interactively with stdout and stderr pointing at the same
place.
Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <rv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/config.txt | 10 ++++++++++
builtin/help.c | 36 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
2 files changed, 43 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index ad0f4510c3..8a1fc8064e 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -2105,6 +2105,16 @@ help.autoCorrect::
value is 0 - the command will be just shown but not executed.
This is the default.
+help.followAlias::
+ When requesting help for an alias, git prints a line of the
+ form "'<alias>' is aliased to '<string>'". If this option is
+ set to a positive integer, git proceeds to show the help for
+ the first word of <string> after the given number of
+ deciseconds. If the value of this option is negative, the
+ redirect happens immediately. If the value is 0 (which is the
+ default), or <string> begins with an exclamation point, no
+ redirect takes place.
+
help.htmlPath::
Specify the path where the HTML documentation resides. File system paths
and URLs are supported. HTML pages will be prefixed with this path when
diff --git a/builtin/help.c b/builtin/help.c
index 8d4f6dd301..ef1c3f0916 100644
--- a/builtin/help.c
+++ b/builtin/help.c
@@ -34,6 +34,7 @@ enum help_format {
};
static const char *html_path;
+static int follow_alias;
static int show_all = 0;
static int show_guides = 0;
@@ -273,6 +274,10 @@ static int git_help_config(const char *var, const char *value, void *cb)
html_path = xstrdup(value);
return 0;
}
+ if (!strcmp(var, "help.followalias")) {
+ follow_alias = git_config_int(var, value);
+ return 0;
+ }
if (!strcmp(var, "man.viewer")) {
if (!value)
return config_error_nonbool(var);
@@ -415,9 +420,34 @@ static const char *check_git_cmd(const char* cmd)
alias = alias_lookup(cmd);
if (alias) {
- printf_ln(_("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"), cmd, alias);
- free(alias);
- exit(0);
+ const char **argv;
+ int count;
+
+ if (!follow_alias || alias[0] == '!') {
+ printf_ln(_("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"), cmd, alias);
+ free(alias);
+ exit(0);
+ }
+ fprintf_ln(stderr, _("'%s' is aliased to '%s'"), cmd, alias);
+
+ /*
+ * We use split_cmdline() to get the first word of the
+ * alias, to ensure that we use the same rules as when
+ * the alias is actually used. split_cmdline()
+ * modifies alias in-place.
+ */
+ count = split_cmdline(alias, &argv);
+ if (count < 0)
+ die("Bad alias.%s string: %s", cmd,
+ split_cmdline_strerror(count));
+
+ if (follow_alias > 0) {
+ fprintf_ln(stderr,
+ _("Continuing to help for %s in %0.1f seconds."),
+ alias, follow_alias/10.0);
+ sleep_millisec(follow_alias * 100);
+ }
+ return alias;
}
if (exclude_guides)
--
2.16.4
