A handy Git shortcut to fetch and prune

Posted 8th July 2020 in Development and Git

I’m still writing my Git commands long-hand. No aliases. In revisiting an article from last year, it struck me that there’s a built in shortcut to perform a command that I gave as an example:

It bugs me that pruning doesn’t happen with a fetch, like it does in Tower, so aliasing git fetch && git remote prune origin to gf or something like that would be lovely

Well, it turns out there’s a -prune flag for the fetch command in Git! So while aliasing a fetch and a prune to gf would be going too far (for me), git fetch && git remote prune origin can be written as git fetch -prune, and that’s a proper Git command. Even better, the -prune flag can be shortened to -p! So the shortcut is:

git fetch -p

Now I can refresh my view of the remote repo while at the same time getting rid of ‘dead’ branches up on my remote, all less than half the characters!

Accessibility in your inbox

I send an accessibility-centric newsletter on the last day of every month, containing:

  • A roundup of the articles I’ve posted
  • A hot pick from my archives
  • Some interesting posts from around the web

I don’t collect any data on when, where or if people open the emails I send them. Your email will only be used to send you newsletters and will never be passed on. You can unsubscribe at any time.

More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Getting started with NVDA

    Everyone who works in digital product development should be familiar with screen reader software. Here’s how to get started with NVDA on Windows.

  2. An enhancement to accessible responsive tables

    I’ve written about accessible responsive tables before but something has been bugging me. So here’s another step to make those tables even better.