Subject: Re: git alias and --help

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:00:31 +0200

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 28.10.2011 06:05:
> Miles Bader <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>> Of course, that would be the wrong thing for somebody that just wants
>> to be reminded what an alias expands too, but my intuition is that
>> this is a very tiny minority compared to people that want to examine
>> the options for the underlying command...
> 
> And it is doubly wrong if help backend is configured to be anything but
> manpages, no?
> 
> As I said, you should be able to come up with a patch that detects and
> special cases the no frills case (replacement to single token) to get what
> you want.

But "help" is still too much to type for the OP ;) How about this in
your config:

[alias]
	h = help
	hh = "!sh -c 'a=$(git config --get alias.$1); : ${a:=$1}; git help
${a%% *}' -"

Ugly as hell, I know, and works only for aliases whose first word is the
name of a git command, as well as for non-aliases. Catching "!command"
type aliases is left as an exercise to the reader.

Michael