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When Linus Torvalds created Git in 2005, he probably didn't immediately realize the impact he would have on modern software development. Of course, back then Git was only developed to be as big as necessary and as small as possible. Over the years, the development community has programmed several additional features for the popular VCS.

TJ Holowaychuk's project Git Extras hosts more than 60 of these "extras" with features that extend the basic functionality of Git. Today I would like to introduce a few of them.

Install

If you're using macOS, installing Git Extras is best done with Homebrew (as with most open source tools):

brew install git-extras.

On Linux, Git Extras is available through each platform's native package manager. Complete installation instructions for other Linux distributions, BSD and other platforms can be found in the Installation.md file in the repository.

Startup

To get an overview of all extras, it is worth running git extras --help after installation. Alternatively there is a Commands.md in the repository which lists and explains all extras. Very nice!

git summary

Creates a useful summary in the repository that looks something like this:

git mr <NUMBER>

Checks out the merge request you specify with <NUMBER>!

git commits-since

Outputs all commits up to a certain point in time. It looks something like this:

git browse

Opens the current repository in the browser.

git reset-file

With git reset-file you can either reset files to the last state in the repository, or to a specific commit!