pretty: add aliases for pretty formats

previously the only ways to alias a --pretty format within git were
either to set the format as your default format (via the format.pretty
configuration variable), or by using a regular git alias. This left the
definition of more complicated formats to the realm of "builtin or
nothing", with user-defined formats usually being reserved for quick
one-offs.

Here we allow user-defined formats to enjoy more or less the same
benefits of builtins. By defining pretty.myalias, "myalias" can be
used in place of whatever would normally come after --pretty=. This
can be a format:, tformat:, raw (ie, defaulting to tformat), or the name
of another builtin or user-defined pretty format.

Signed-off-by: Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/pretty-formats.txt b/Documentation/pretty-formats.txt
index 1686a54d2..5e95df6ba 100644
--- a/Documentation/pretty-formats.txt
+++ b/Documentation/pretty-formats.txt
@@ -11,7 +11,12 @@ have limited your view of history: for example, if you are
 only interested in changes related to a certain directory or
 file.
 
-Here are some additional details for each format:
+There are several built-in formats, and you can define
+additional formats by setting a pretty.<name>
+config option to either another format name, or a
+'format:' string, as described below (see
+linkgit:git-config[1]). Here are the details of the
+built-in formats:
 
 * 'oneline'