alias.*::
Command aliases for the linkgit:git[1] command wrapper - e.g.
- after defining "alias.last = cat-file commit HEAD", the invocation
- "git last" is equivalent to "git cat-file commit HEAD". To avoid
+ after defining `alias.last = cat-file commit HEAD`, the invocation
+ `git last` is equivalent to `git cat-file commit HEAD`. To avoid
confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that
hide existing Git commands are ignored. Arguments are split by
spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping is supported.
A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.
+
+Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a
+command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the
+invocation of `git`. In particular, this is useful when used with `-c`
+to pass in one-time configurations or `-p` to force pagination. For example,
+`loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase` can be defined such that
+running `git loud-rebase` would be equivalent to
+`git -c commit.verbose=true rebase`. Also, `ps = -p status` would be a
+helpful alias since `git ps` would paginate the output of `git status`
+where the original command does not.
++
If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point,
it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining
-"alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD", the invocation
-"git new" is equivalent to running the shell command
-"gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD". Note that shell commands will be
+`alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD`, the invocation
+`git new` is equivalent to running the shell command
+`gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD`. Note that shell commands will be
executed from the top-level directory of a repository, which may
not necessarily be the current directory.
-`GIT_PREFIX` is set as returned by running 'git rev-parse --show-prefix'
+`GIT_PREFIX` is set as returned by running `git rev-parse --show-prefix`
from the original current directory. See linkgit:git-rev-parse[1].