I can only concur about the genuine usefulness of symbolic refs as branch aliases. I wrote my shell script for this 5 years ago, and I've made use of the facility almost every working day since. I jump around branches frequently, and my feature branch names always start with an issue/bug number followed by a short description -- which is perfect for listings and seeing at a glance what a branch is about, and terrible for tab-completion. Those long branch names are useful and informative for the developers on the project, but being able to also have a 2-3 letter alias in my working copy for the lifetime of a branch -- something which is trivial for me to remember and type -- gives me the best of both worlds, and I find it to be a tremendous convenience. It's really not dissimilar to why so many people find shell aliases to be so handy. The nice thing is that all the plumbing is already there and working. I've used it happily for 5 years, and other people use it similarly. This feature just adds some protective porcelain over it, so that people can more easily make use of the existing benefits without any of the potential dangers. -Phil
