Installation

gem install clone_git_file

Description

;tldr

This gem allows you to replace these commands:

1. mkdir -p ~/dev/author
2. cd ~/dev/author
3. git clone https://github.com/author/repo
4. cd repo
5. myeditor file.rb

with:

ogf https://github.com/author/repo/file.rb (if you choose to setup an alias)

Long version

This gem will clone the repository containing a file, optionally opening that file in your chosen editor. If the repository already exists in the specified directory, any uncommitted changes will be lost (git reset HEAD --hard will be run). The repository will be pulled after resetting, to get the latest changes.

The editor that will be used is specified using the EDITOR environment variable, which allows you to easily override your editor only for this command.

Usage

At a minimum, you need to specify a target directory and url:

TARGET_DIRECTORY=~/dev clone_git_file https://github.com/brandoncc/clone_git_file/blob/master/README.md

That will clone this repository to ~/dev/clone_git_file, then switch to the master branch. A message will then be shown giving you that location.

There are command switches available as follows:

Switch	Description
-o, --open	Open the file in the specified editor after cloning
-t, --terminal	Output the command which would be used to open the file in your editor, as text in the terminal. This is useful for piping into other commands. Since Ruby system method executions are run in a child process, this is useful for opening the file in your editor in the current shell (more details in the bonus section). This is equivalent to -ot.
-s, --silent	Suppress messages from the cloning process. If you want to pipe the output of -t into a command, you should also use this.

If you want to override your default editor, just add EDITOR=myeditor to the beginning. For example:

EDITOR=mvim TARGET_DIRECTORY=~/dev clone_git_file https://github.com/brandoncc/clone_git_file/blob/master/README.md

Bonus

• You can also supply the repo url or a repo subdirectory url, and that directory will be opened by your editor.

• Setup an alias and/or function to make using the gem easy. For example, here are mine (zsh):

  alias cgf="TARGET_DIRECTORY=~/dev EDITOR=mvim clone_git_file $1"
  
  function ogf () {
    echo "Cloning, your editor will open when clone has completed..."
    source <(TARGET_DIRECTORY=~/dev EDITOR=mvim clone_git_file -ts $1)
  }

  cgf clones, then prints a message with the location of the cloned file/directory.

  ogf prints the commands to open the file/directory in my editor. I then use source <(...) to pipe the printed command to source which runs it in my current shell. This fixes some weird things that happen when opening the editor in a child process, and also allows the current directory of my current shell to be changed (instead of the child process shell which will be lost when you close the editor).

  ogf has to be a function so that $1 will expand properly. If you use an alias instead, $1 doesn't hold the correct value in the nested command.

Limitations

• Github is the only service that is currently compatible. I would like to add more services in the future.
• -s, --silent is only available on operating systems which can direct output to /dev/null, which means it is unavailable on Windows.