git-vimEdit

git-vim is a plugin that provides access to some Git functionality from within Vim.

Where to get it

I have a fork of the official repo, with some patches to fix some minor issues:

Installation

git clone git://github.com/motemen/git-vim.git git-vim.git
cd git-vim.git
cp plugin/git.vim ~/.vim/plugin/
cp syntax/git-* ~/.vim/syntax/

Use

Key mappings

The README at the official repo provides a full list, but here are some of the most useful key mappings:

  • <leader>gd: calls :GitDiff with no args (shows unstaged changes; same as git diff)
  • <leader>gD: calls :GitDiff --cached (shows staged changes; same as git diff --cached)
  • <leader>gs: calls :GitStatus (git status)
  • <leader>gl: calls :GitLog (calls git log for the current file; to get the repo-wide log you have to manually do :GitLog HEAD)
  • <leader>ga: calls :GitAdd with no args (stages the current file using git add)
  • <leader>gA: calls :GitAdd with filename completion (stages the specified file using git add)
  • <leader>gc: calls :GitCommit (same as git commit; but note that if you have no staged changes then it will assume git commit -a)

In practice I use :GitCommit -s to sign off my commits; <leader>gc is really only good for "throw-away" commits because it produces commits without signoffs.

Commands

In addition to the commands already mentioned above, some of the more useful ones include:

  • :Git <args>: arbitrary Git command
  • :GitCheckout <args>: useful for resetting individual files to the HEAD state (eg. :GitCheckout HEAD -- foo.c)

There are also a bunch of other commands that I can’t really see myself using from within Vim (:GitPull, :GitPullRebase, :GitPush, :GitCatFile and so on).

Note that commands like :GitDiff and :GitCheckout complete Git commits.