There some things that are good to know, but not strictly necessary. Here's an (incompplete) list of the ideas. Please feel free to add any 'life hacks' you know/discover to this!
In old repos, there's ususally a lot of history. So, cloning them often takes many GBs, while the actual code you'd like to download(to, for example, browse around) is only a few dozen MBs. To get around this, we can use git clone --depth 1. For example, git clone --depth 1 git@github.com:pytorch/pytorch.git takes significantly less time than cloning the entire repo.
There are some commands that we use all the time(for example, git status). To avoid typing status every single time, we can tell git to interpret git s as git status. To do this, run
git config --global alias.s statusYou can replace s with anything other alias. The --global flag tells git that we want this setting to be applied everywhere.
You can make a lot of tweaks to git to make it better. For example, if you misspell commands all the time, you can tell git to autocorrect you and run the command in a couple of seconds:
git config --global help.autoCorrect 50This will autocorrect your commands(for example, from git rebaes to git rebase) in 5 seconds and run it.
Some other common options are(thanks @Animeshz for these):
git config --global user.email <email> # set your default commit email
git config --global user.name <full-name> # set your default commit name
git config --global core.editor code # use vscode to edit commit messages etc
git config --global core.editor vim # use vim to edit commit messages etc
git config --global core.editor nano # use nano to edit commit messages etc
A complete list of all configuration options can be found here.
You can go to https://learngitbranching.js.org/ to learn more advanced git topics in a interactive and visual method. Complete the exercises and create a PR with a screenshot showing completed levels. You will get 1 point every 5 exercises, and 4 points for completing all of it.