I am in the middle of recreating my site with Jekyll. More to come…

I use the terminal all the time while I code and I like things to go fast when i do. Tab completion is a habit once you have it will stay with you forever. When on a system that does not do it, you go crazy. Like I did. On top of normal completion I use GIT a lot. So I want git to auto-complete remote name and especially branch names which I have a ton of. So here is a guide to get total completion going.

I just do it for the current user you can do this for system wide too and I will note the tweaks you can mak to this guide at the bottom.

Download and clone bash_completion and the source for git as follows:

cd; mkdir src; cd src
wget http://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org/files/bash-completion-1.3.tar.bz2
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git

untar the bas-completion file

tar xvf bash-completion-1.3.tar.bz2

copy the files to your home directory (I hide them with the “.”)

cp bash-completion-1.3/bash_completion ~/.bash_completion
cp git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash ~/.git-completion.bash

in your .bashrc or .profile file add the following two lines:

. ~/.bash_completion
. ~/.git-completion.bash

That should do it! So load up a new terminal and try it out!

These are the articles that I used to get this together.

http://meinit.nl/bash-completion-mac-os-x

I was hunting around for how to do this. Why!? Well, because I forget the simple at times. I knew that the knowledge was between my ears but retrieving it was thwarting me. So Googling is what I do to jiggle the brain cells. Well the answer is simple and totally non-intuitive.

git push origin :branchtodelete

What?! Well look carfully there is a colon in there ”:”. “What the hell?” I hear you saying. Yes it is darn kludgy but it works.

Now a word of warning. In general you do not want to delete a branch that you have made public even if it is only for a select group of developers. you never know how it is being used by others.