These are my collection of git tools and configs to brighten your life

Some are my own creation. Some (mainly the gitconfig) are based on others

(note: this repo was originally "git-timemachine" from 2020, and became "neon-git" in 2024 as the scope broadened)

My depersonalised gitconfig. Mainly here for the aliases. Some are practical, some fun. (git lg1 is my musclememory replacement for git log).

It's not nescessarily a clean or well documented config

ghls is a "github ls". On a normal directory it runs "ls" with suitable options to give a listing identical to github. In a git repo, it gives commit info per file and directory, mimicking the github interface.

Two versions ghls and ghls2 exist.

• ghls
  • a little more verbose
  • includes info about modified files in subdirectories
• ghls2
  • cleaner code via rewrite
  • cleaner output is not hardcoded to 80 column width
  • missing indication of modified files within subdirectories

Note that this is the script which moved the repo away from being "git-timemachine" and into just being my personalised set of git helpers

scrape all unique revisions of a file from git commits, giving each a unique name within "_raw" path.

Generate a git commit message suitable for auto commits. It generates a message that is a hybrid of git status and git diff, making reading this info easier for future casual reading of git log

These are tools to help turn a directory of script archives into a git repo, and maintain appropriate timing metadata

So far, timemachine has two tools

• git-timemachine
• chronocsv2git.sh

git-timemachine is the low level worker, with chronocsv2git being the main intended tool and can be thought of as an alternative to git fast-import, and (arguably) is better suited to the use case of "recovering multiple historic versions from backups and assembling into a repo".

Key to it's function is that it imports files from files, with git metadata (git comments, branches, dates, etc) taken from a seperate CSV control file, or the filesystem timestamps of the files being imported.

Incidentally, git fast-import is described here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ch05.html#_making_history

This script outputs GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment lines matching the mtime of a file given as $1 (if none given, then it prompts for a file or date.

These env variables are described in more detail online, for eg:

• https://alexpeattie.com/blog/working-with-dates-in-git/
• https://www.slingacademy.com/article/how-to-tweak-git-commit-timestamps-author-committer-dates/

These lines can then be copypasta as required to the local shell.

Users may prefer an alias to turn "git-timemachine" into "git timemachine"

git config --global alias.timemachine '!git-timemachine $3'

For scripted use, the output can be processed automatically by eval

eval $(git timemachine [file|string])

Note: I have chosen to use echo/eval rather than "source" so the default running of the script is informative.

• First dozen or so commits (2005-2020) in https://github.com/nemothorx/indexpage
  • Added via this script: https://github.com/nemothorx/indexpage/commit/0ca47029637fc5ec21c20a6c46765169f71a4f02

• path/to/file - and get it's mtime
• string - parse it as a datetime string with date(1) unless one of:
  • "status" - display our times
  • "now|return|reset" - unset our variables
• no ARG1 - prompt within the script for either of the above ...if still nothing, then unset our variables

• Using "eval" method without a param will silently prompt for input, and then silently fail regardless of input.
• Filenames take precedence over other interpretations of the input string
  • Thus it's impossible to use "status" "now" "return" or "reset" if a file by that name exists in the PWD.
    • Workaround: change to a different directory before running those

NOTE: chronocsv2.git is not considered finished. Use at own risk

A script which takes a prepared csv (tab seperated though) referencing historic files, and controls git and git-timemachine to add them to a repo with suitable dates.

Usage: prepare chronogit.csv and then simply run chronocsv2git.sh