From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2019 19:38:15 +0000 (-0700)
Subject: Merge branch 'dl/config-alias-doc' into maint
X-Git-Tag: v2.23.0-rc0~1^2~22
X-Git-Url: https://git.lorimer.id.au/gitweb.git/diff_plain/747201d0c847980b3dc63eb0afc583dfac9c9d20?hp=ea219657a3a3bc10058a8fc623056fa83e231d03

Merge branch 'dl/config-alias-doc' into maint

Doc update.

* dl/config-alias-doc:
config/alias.txt: document alias accepting non-command first word
config/alias.txt: change " and ' to `
---

diff --git a/Documentation/config/alias.txt b/Documentation/config/alias.txt
index 0b14178314..f1ca739d57 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/alias.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/alias.txt
@@ -1,18 +1,28 @@
 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].