take your gitconfig to your pair mate

Drum roll, please. This is the third post about pair programming in a row.

On my own box I use mostly TextMate, while my pair mate Tim prefers vi, so there’s no point in taking settings from one environment to the other. By contrast, we both use git directly from the shell, without any wrapping GUI and we of course have some aliases defined to reduce the amout of tedious typing. The thing is that the aliases don’t match exactly. Some do, some don’t. After a few futile attempts to use my unavailable aliases, I was determined to build something to help me get a little closer to my usual environment. And today I did it.

I whipped up a very basic version of a tool that does the following.

• Accept a Github username to be passed, pick the gitconfig of the user identified by this username from his user page
• Find out which settings can be imported without clashing with existing settings
• Import the non-conflicting ones and tell the user

Sounds interesting? Have a look at this handy little fellow over at Github.