Using aliases

What are aliases?

Aliases are an easy way to create shortcuts for commonly-typed commands, or to set defaults for commands.

Defining aliases

Command aliases can be defined in the [ALIASES] section of your breezy.conf file. Aliases start with the alias name, then an equal sign, then a command fragment. Here’s an example ALIASES section:

[ALIASES]
recentlog=log -r-3..-1
ll=log --line -r-10..-1
commit=commit --strict
diff=diff --diff-options -p

Here are the explanations of the examples above:

  • The first alias makes a new recentlog command that shows the logs for the last three revisions

  • The ll alias shows the last 10 log entries in line format.

  • the commit alias sets the default for commit to refuse to commit if new files in the tree are not recognized.

  • the diff alias adds the coveted -p option to diff

Using the aliases

The aliases defined above would be used like so:

% brz recentlog
% brz ll
% brz commit
% brz diff

Rules for aliases

  • You can override a portion of the options given in an alias by specifying the new part on the command-line. For example, if you run lastlog -r-5.., you will only get five line-based log entries instead of 10. Note that all boolean options have an implicit inverse, so you can override the commit alias with commit --no-strict.

  • Aliases can override the standard behaviour of existing commands by giving an alias name that is the same as the original command. For example, default commit is changed with commit=commit --strict.

  • Aliases cannot refer to other aliases. In other words making a lastlog alias and referring to it with a ll alias will not work. This includes aliases that override standard commands.

  • Giving the --no-aliases option to the brz command will tell it to ignore aliases for that run. For example, running brz --no-aliases commit will perform a standard commit instead, not do a commit --strict.