All I can say is that I find some words like whiltelist, blacklist and master/slave awful. I do realize that the context in git might not be racist, however I am trying to be nice-by-default person. I won’t comment more on the situation as this blog is strictly non-political. So let’s be technical in that regard:
If one of your projects rename master to main and you are having hard time checking out the mainline branch, I have a tip for you:
$ alias gcm='git checkout master || git checkout main || git checkout gh-pages'
$ alias gll='(git checkout master || git checkout main || git checkout gh-pages) && git pull'
If you prefer git subcommand aliases, git cm for example, then add this to
your git configuration:
$ cat ~/.gitconfig
[alias]
# ... gazillion of my other aliases ...
cm = !sh -c 'git checkout master || git checkout main || git checkout gh-pages'
Checking out main branch is now easy, you don’t need to ever think about which project are you working on:
$ gcm
error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git
Switched to branch 'main'
You can ignore the error when git was unable to find “master” branch, that’s expected. I did not bother to solve this issue, you can probably redirect the standard error if you find this annoying. Let me know on my twitter @lzap if this helped to you, if you have a better solution or similar tip.
I have been using this for years, our project Foreman actually use a different term for the mainline branch. We call it the “develop” branch.
Oh, by the way, Steve Job’s style: it even works for github pages repositories.