GIT-CONFIG(1)

💅 GIT-CONFIG(1) 💅

okay bestie, welcome to GIT-CONFIG(1) straight from the Git Manual — the page about getting and setting repository or global options. it's giving config-file main character energy, and we're gonna read it like a group chat. 👑

✨ NAME ✨

git-config — Get and set repository or global options

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

git config list [<file-option>] [<display-option>] [--includes]
git config get [<file-option>] [<display-option>] [--includes] [--all] [--regexp] [--value=<pattern>] [--fixed-value] [--default=<default>] [--url=<url>] <name>
git config set [<file-option>] [--type=<type>] [--all] [--value=<pattern>] [--fixed-value] <name> <value>
git config unset [<file-option>] [--all] [--value=<pattern>] [--fixed-value] <name>
git config rename-section [<file-option>] <old-name> <new-name>
git config remove-section [<file-option>] <name>
git config edit [<file-option>]
git config [<file-option>] --get-colorbool <name> [<stdout-is-tty>]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the vibe: you can query, set, replace, and unset options with this command. The name is actually the section and the key separated by a dot, and the value will be escaped. periodt.

Multiple lines can be added to an option by using the --append option. If you want to update or unset an option which can occur on multiple lines, --value=<pattern> needs to be given — and that pattern is an extended regular expression, unless the --fixed-value option is given. Only the existing values that match the pattern are updated or unset. If you want to handle the lines that do not match the pattern, just prepend a single exclamation mark in front (see also the section called “EXAMPLES”), but note that this only works when the --fixed-value option is not in use.

The --type=<type> option tells git config to make sure incoming and outgoing values are canonicalize-able under the given <type>. If no --type=<type> is given, no canonicalization will be performed. Callers may unset an existing --type specifier with --no-type.

When reading, the values are read from the system, global and repository local configuration files by default, and options --system, --global, --local, --worktree and --file <filename> can be used to tell the command to read from only that location (see the section called “FILES”).

When writing, the new value is written to the repository local configuration file by default, and options --system, --global, --worktree, --file <filename> can be used to tell the command to write to that location (you can say --local but that is the default).

This command will fail with non-zero status upon error. Some exit codes are:

The section or key is invalid (ret=1),
no section or name was provided (ret=2),
the config file is invalid (ret=3),
the config file cannot be written (ret=4),
you try to unset an option which does not exist (ret=5),
you try to unset/set an option for which multiple lines match (ret=5), or
you try to use an invalid regexp (ret=6).

On success, the command returns the exit code 0.

A list of all available configuration variables can be obtained using the git help --config command.

💖 COMMANDS 💖

list — lists all variables set in config file, along with their values.
get — emits the value of the specified key. If key is present multiple times in the configuration, it emits the last value. If --all is specified, it emits all values associated with key. Returns error code 1 if key is not present.
set — sets value for one or more config options. By default, this command refuses to write multi-valued config options. Passing --all will replace all multi-valued config options with the new value, whereas --value= will replace all config options whose values match the given pattern.
unset — unsets value for one or more config options. By default, this command refuses to unset multi-valued keys. Passing --all will unset all multi-valued config options, whereas --value will unset all config options whose values match the given pattern.
rename-section — renames the given section to a new name.
remove-section — removes the given section from the configuration file.
edit — opens an editor to modify the specified config file; either --system, --global, --local (default), --worktree, or --file <config-file>.

✨ OPTIONS ✨

okay bestie, this is the big one — every single flag, no skipping, i promise 💅

--replace-all — so the default vibe is "replace at most one line", right? This one goes off and replaces all the lines matching the key (and optionally --value=<pattern>). all of them. every last one. 🔥
--append — adds a new line to the option without touching any existing values, like, at all. it's literally the same as passing --value=^$ to set. no cap.
--comment <message> — drops a comment at the end of new or modified lines 🎀
- if <message> starts with one or more whitespaces followed by #, it gets used as-is.
- if it starts with #, a space gets prepended before it's used.
- otherwise, the string " # " (a space, a hash, a space) gets prepended to it.
- the resulting string lands immediately after the value defined for the variable.

⚠️ <message> must NOT contain linefeed characters — no multi-line comments, periodt. 😭

--all — with get, returns all the values for a multi-valued key. all of them, bestie.
--regexp — with get, treats the name as a regular expression. heads up: matching is currently case-sensitive, and it's done against a canonicalized version of the key where section and variable names are lowercased — but subsection names are not. iykyk 🦋
--url=<URL> — when you give a two-part <name> as <section>.<key>, it returns the value for <section>.<URL>.<key> whose <URL> part matches the given URL best (and if no such key exists, the value for <section>.<key> is used as a fallback). when you give just the <section> as the name, it does that for all the keys in the section and lists them. returns error code 1 if no value is found. 💀
--global — for writing options: writes to the global ~/.gitconfig file instead of the repository .git/config, and writes to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config if that file exists and ~/.gitconfig doesn't. for reading options: reads only from global ~/.gitconfig and from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config instead of from all available files. see also the section called "FILES" 🫶
--system — for writing options: writes to system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig instead of the repository .git/config. for reading options: reads only from system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig instead of from all available files. also see "FILES" ✨
--local — for writing options: writes to the repository .git/config file. this is the default behavior, main character energy fr. for reading options: reads only from the repository .git/config instead of from all available files. "FILES" section again, you know the drill 💖
--worktree — similar to --local except that $GIT_DIR/config.worktree is read from or written to if extensions.worktreeConfig is enabled. if it's not enabled, it's the same as --local. note that $GIT_DIR is equal to $GIT_COMMON_DIR for the main working tree, but it's of the form $GIT_DIR/worktrees/<id>/ for other working trees 🌈. see git-worktree(1) to learn how to enable extensions.worktreeConfig.
-f <config-file>, --file <config-file> — for writing options: writes to the specified file instead of the repository .git/config. for reading options: reads only from the specified file instead of from all available files. yes, "FILES" section, love that for us 🎀
--blob <blob> — like --file but uses the given blob instead of a file. e.g. you can use master:.gitmodules to read values from the file .gitmodules in the master branch 👑. see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in gitrevisions(7) for a more complete list of ways to spell blob names.
--value=<pattern>, --no-value — with get, set, and unset, matches only against <pattern>. the pattern is an extended regular expression unless --fixed-value is given. and use --no-value to unset <pattern>. 🧚
--fixed-value — when used with --value=<pattern>, treats <pattern> as an exact string instead of a regular expression. this restricts the name/value pairs that get matched to only those where the value is exactly equal to <pattern>. no fuzzy vibes allowed 💅
--type <type> — git config will make sure any input or output is valid under the given type constraint(s), and will canonicalize outgoing values into <type>'s canonical form. valid <type>'s include:
- bool: canonicalizes values true, yes, on, and positive numbers as "true", and values false, no, off and 0 as "false". ⭐
- int: canonicalizes values as simple decimal numbers. an optional suffix of k, m, or g causes the value to be multiplied by 1024, 1048576, or 1073741824 upon input.
- bool-or-int: canonicalizes according to either bool or int, as described above.
- path: canonicalizes by expanding a leading ~ to the value of $HOME and ~user to the home directory for the specified user. this specifier has no effect when setting the value (but you can use git config section.variable ~/ from the command line to let your shell do the expansion 🙈).
- expiry-date: canonicalizes by converting from a fixed or relative date-string to a timestamp. this specifier has no effect when setting the value.
- color: when getting a value, canonicalizes by converting to an ANSI color escape sequence. when setting a value, a sanity-check is performed to ensure the given value is canonicalize-able as an ANSI color — but it's written as-is.

and if the command is in list mode, then the --type <type> argument applies to each listed config value 🦋. if a value doesn't successfully parse in that format, it gets omitted from the list. bye bestie 👋

--bool, --int, --bool-or-int, --path, --expiry-date — historical options for selecting a type specifier. prefer --type instead (see above), these are giving vintage 💀
--no-type — un-sets the previously set type specifier (if one was previously set). this option requests that git config not canonicalize the retrieved variable. and heads up: --no-type has no effect without --type=<type> or --<type>.
-z, --null — for all options that output values and/or keys, always ends values with the null character (instead of a newline), and uses a newline instead as the delimiter between key and value. this allows for secure parsing of the output without getting confused by, like, values that contain line breaks. iconic for scripting 🔥
--name-only — outputs only the names of config variables for list or get. short and sweet.
--show-names, --no-show-names — with get, shows config keys in addition to their values. the default is --no-show-names unless --url is given and there are no subsections in <name> 🎀
--show-origin — augments the output of all queried config options with the origin type (file, standard input, blob, command line) and the actual origin (config file path, ref, or blob id if applicable). receipts, basically 🧾✨
--show-scope — similar to --show-origin in that it augments the output of all queried config options with the scope of that value (worktree, local, global, system, command). 💖
--get-colorbool <name> [<stdout-is-tty>] — finds the color setting for <name> (e.g. color.diff) and outputs "true" or "false". <stdout-is-tty> should be either "true" or "false", and it's taken into account when the configuration says "auto". if <stdout-is-tty> is missing, then it checks the standard output of the command itself, and exits with status 0 if color is to be used, or exits with status 1 otherwise 🌈. when the color setting for name is undefined, the command uses color.ui as fallback.
--includes, --no-includes — respects include.* directives in config files when looking up values. defaults to off when a specific file is given (e.g. using --file, --global, etc) and on when searching all config files. 🦋
--default <value> — when using get and the requested variable isn't found, behaves as if <value> were the value assigned to that variable. a little fallback bestie 🫶

💀 DEPRECATED MODES 💀

okay so these modes have been deprecated in favor of subcommands — it's recommended to migrate to the new syntax, bestie. they're giving flip phone in 2025 📱💀

git config <name> — replaced by git config get <name>.
git config <name> <value> [<value-pattern>] — replaced by git config set [--value=<pattern>] <name> <value>.
-l, --list — replaced by git config list.
--get <name> [<value-pattern>] — replaced by git config get [--value=<pattern>] <name>.
--get-all <name> [<value-pattern>] — replaced by git config get [--value=<pattern>] --all <name>.
--get-regexp <name-regexp> — replaced by git config get --all --show-names --regexp <name-regexp>.
--get-urlmatch <name> <URL> — replaced by git config get --url=<URL> <name>.
--get-color <name> [<default>] — replaced by git config get --type=color [--default=<default>] <name>.
--add <name> <value> — replaced by git config set --append <name> <value>.
--unset <name> [<value-pattern>] — replaced by git config unset [--value=<pattern>] <name>.
--unset-all <name> [<value-pattern>] — replaced by git config unset [--value=<pattern>] --all <name>.
--rename-section <old-name> <new-name> — replaced by git config rename-section <old-name> <new-name>.
--remove-section <name> — replaced by git config remove-section <name>.
-e, --edit — replaced by git config edit.

🎀 CONFIGURATION 🎀

tiny section, big vibes: pager.config is only respected when listing configuration — i.e., when using list or get which may return multiple results 💅. and the default is to use a pager. that's it, that's the whole thing 🦋

okay bestie, this is the part where we talk about where all this config actually lives — like the filesystem addresses of your settings 💅

🗂️ FILES

So by default, git config doesn't just read one file, it reads a whole lil' stack of them, in order:

$(prefix)/etc/gitconfig — the system-wide configuration file. The big boss-level one for the whole machine. 👑
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config, ~/.gitconfig — your user-specific configuration files. When the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable is not set or empty, $HOME/.config/ is used as $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

These are also called "global" configuration files. If both files exist, both files are read in the order given above. 🫶

$GIT_DIR/config — the repository specific configuration file, aka the main character of this repo.
$GIT_DIR/config.worktree — this one is optional and is only searched when extensions.worktreeConfig is present in $GIT_DIR/config. Very exclusive, very iykyk. ✨

You may also provide additional configuration parameters when running any git command by using the -c option. See git(1) for details.

Options will be read from all of these files that are available. If the global or the system-wide configuration files are missing or unreadable they will be ignored. If the repository configuration file is missing or unreadable, git config will exit with a non-zero error code. An error message is produced if the file is unreadable, but not if it is missing. (Not me being dramatic about a missing file vs an unreadable one 😭 but the distinction is real.)

The files are read in the order given above, with last value found taking precedence over values read earlier. When multiple values are taken then all values of a key from all files will be used. Last one wins, bestie — classic.

By default, options are only written to the repository specific configuration file. Note that this also affects options like set and unset. git config will only ever change one file at a time. One file. That's it. No multitasking. 💅

You can limit which configuration sources are read from or written to by specifying the path of a file with the --file option, or by specifying a configuration scope with --system, --global, --local, or --worktree. For more, see the section called “OPTIONS” above.

🎯 SCOPES

Every configuration source falls inside a configuration scope. Here's the lineup, no cap:

system — $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig
global — $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config

~/.gitconfig

local — $GIT_DIR/config
worktree — $GIT_DIR/config.worktree
command — GIT_CONFIG_{COUNT,KEY,VALUE} environment variables (see the section called “ENVIRONMENT” below)

the -c option

With the exception of command, each scope corresponds to a command line option: --system, --global, --local, --worktree. iconic, consistent, organized ✨

When reading options, specifying a scope will only read options from the files within that scope. When writing options, specifying a scope will write to the files within that scope (instead of the repository specific configuration file). See the section called “OPTIONS” above for a complete description.

Most configuration options are respected regardless of the scope it is defined in, but some options are only respected in certain scopes. See the respective option’s documentation for the full details. 👀

🛡️ Protected configuration

Protected configuration refers to the system, global, and command scopes. For security reasons, certain options are only respected when they are specified in protected configuration, and ignored otherwise. Ignored. Otherwise. Periodt.

Git treats these scopes as if they are controlled by the user or a trusted administrator. This is because an attacker who controls these scopes can do substantial harm without using Git, so it is assumed that the user’s environment protects these scopes against attackers. So like, that's the whole security model — keep your scopes safe, bestie 🫶

🌱 ENVIRONMENT

GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL, GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM — take the configuration from the given files instead from global or system-level configuration. See git(1) for details. 🦋
GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM — whether to skip reading settings from the system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig file. See git(1) for details.

See also the section called “FILES”.

GIT_CONFIG_COUNT, GIT_CONFIG_KEY_<n>, GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_<n> — if GIT_CONFIG_COUNT is set to a positive number, all environment pairs GIT_CONFIG_KEY_<n> and GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_<n> up to that number will be added to the process’s runtime configuration. The config pairs are zero-indexed. Any missing key or value is treated as an error. An empty GIT_CONFIG_COUNT is treated the same as GIT_CONFIG_COUNT=0, namely no pairs are processed. These environment variables will override values in configuration files, but will be overridden by any explicit options passed via git -c.

This is useful for cases where you want to spawn multiple git commands with a common configuration but cannot depend on a configuration file, for example when writing scripts. script girlies rise up 📜

GIT_CONFIG — if no --file option is provided to git config, use the file given by GIT_CONFIG as if it were provided via --file. This variable has no effect on other Git commands, and is mostly for historical compatibility; there is generally no reason to use it instead of the --file option. (legacy queen, we still love her, but like… use --file 💀)

🌈 EXAMPLES

Okay bestie, imagine a .git/config that looks exactly like this:

#
# This is the config file, and
# a '#' or ';' character indicates
# a comment
#

; core variables
[core]
        ; Don't trust file modes
        filemode = false

; Our diff algorithm
[diff]
        external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
        renames = true

; Proxy settings
[core]
        gitproxy=proxy-command for kernel.org
        gitproxy=default-proxy ; for all the rest

; HTTP
[http]
        sslVerify
[http "https://weak.example.com"]
        sslVerify = false
        cookieFile = /tmp/cookie.txt

you can set the filemode to true with

% git config set core.filemode true

The hypothetical proxy command entries actually have a postfix to discern what URL they apply to. Here is how to change the entry for kernel.org to "ssh".

% git config set --value='for kernel.org$' core.gitproxy '"ssh" for kernel.org'

This makes sure that only the key/value pair for kernel.org is replaced. precision, bestie 🎯

To delete the entry for renames, do

% git config unset diff.renames

If you want to delete an entry for a multivar (like core.gitproxy above), you have to provide a regex matching the value of exactly one line.

To query the value for a given key, do

% git config get core.filemode

or, to query a multivar:

% git config get --value="for kernel.org$" core.gitproxy

If you want to know all the values for a multivar, do:

% git config get --all --show-names core.gitproxy

If you like to live dangerously, you can replace all core.gitproxy by a new one with

% git config set --all core.gitproxy ssh

However, if you really only want to replace the line for the default proxy, i.e. the one without a "for ..." postfix, do something like this:

% git config set --value='! for ' core.gitproxy ssh

To actually match only values with an exclamation mark, you have to

% git config set --value='[!]' section.key value

To add a new proxy, without altering any of the existing ones, use

% git config set --append core.gitproxy '"proxy-command" for example.com'

An example to use customized color from the configuration in your script:

#!/bin/sh
WS=$(git config get --type=color --default="blue reverse" color.diff.whitespace)
RESET=$(git config get --type=color --default="reset" "")
echo "${WS}your whitespace color or blue reverse${RESET}"

For URLs in https://weak.example.com, http.sslVerify is set to false, while it is set to true for all others:

% git config get --type=bool --url=https://good.example.com http.sslverify
true
% git config get --type=bool --url=https://weak.example.com http.sslverify
false
% git config get --url=https://weak.example.com http
http.cookieFile /tmp/cookie.txt
http.sslverify false

✨ URL-scoped config ate and left no crumbs ✨

📜 CONFIGURATION FILE

The Git configuration file contains a number of variables that affect the Git commands' behavior. The files .git/config and optionally config.worktree (see the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of git-worktree(1)) in each repository are used to store the configuration for that repository, and $HOME/.gitconfig is used to store a per-user configuration as fallback values for the .git/config file. The file /etc/gitconfig can be used to store a system-wide default configuration.

The configuration variables are used by both the Git plumbing and the porcelain commands. The variables are divided into sections, wherein the fully qualified variable name of the variable itself is the last dot-separated segment and the section name is everything before the last dot. The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character. Some variables may appear multiple times; we say then that the variable is multivalued. multivalued = the moment a variable said "why choose one" 💅

✍️ Syntax

The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive. Whitespace characters, which in this context are the space character (SP) and the horizontal tabulation (HT), are mostly ignored. The # and ; characters begin comments to the end of line. Blank lines are ignored.

The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next section begins. Section names are case-insensitive. Only alphanumeric characters, - and . are allowed in section names. Each variable must belong to some section, which means that there must be a section header before the first setting of a variable.

Sections can be further divided into subsections. To begin a subsection put its name in double quotes, separated by space from the section name, in the section header, like in the example below:

        [section "subsection"]

Subsection names are case sensitive and can contain any characters except newline and the null byte. Doublequote " and backslash can be included by escaping them as \" and \\, respectively. Backslashes preceding other characters are dropped when reading; for example, \t is read as t and \0 is read as 0. Section headers cannot span multiple lines. Variables may belong directly to a section or to a given subsection. You can have [section] if you have [section "subsection"], but you don’t need to. you can but you don't have to — the most gen z sentence in this whole manpage 😭

There is also a deprecated [section.subsection] syntax. With this syntax, the subsection name is converted to lower-case and is also compared case sensitively. These subsection names follow the same restrictions as section names. deprecated, bestie — it's giving legacy, tread carefully ⚠️

Every other line — like, literally every line that isn't a section header, plus whatever's left over after the header itself — is recognized as setting a variable, in the form name = value (or just name, which is the short-hand to say the variable is the boolean true, cute 💅).

Variable names are case-insensitive, only allow alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character. That's the vibe check, no exceptions 🫶

Whitespace characters surrounding name, = and value get discarded. Internal whitespace characters within value are retained verbatim, every single space, protected 🎀 Comments starting with either # or ; and extending to the end of the line are discarded. And a line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by ending it with a backslash (\) — the backslash and the end-of-line characters are discarded too. Sneaky, iconic, slay.

If value needs to contain leading or trailing whitespace characters, it must be enclosed in double quotation marks ("). Inside double quotation marks, double quote (") and backslash (\) characters must be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \. That's the whole contract, iykyk.

The following escape sequences (beside \" and \\) are recognized: \n for newline character (NL), \t for horizontal tabulation (HT, TAB) and \b for backspace (BS). Other char escape sequences (including octal escape sequences) are invalid. Straight up invalid, don't try it 🙈

🌸 Includes 🌸

The include and includeIf sections let you pull config directives in from another source. These sections behave identically to each other, with exactly one exception: includeIf sections may be ignored if their condition does not evaluate to true — see "Conditional includes" below, bestie 👀

You can include a config file from another by setting the special include.path (or includeIf.*.path) variable to the name of the file to be included. The variable takes a pathname as its value, and is subject to tilde expansion. These variables can be given multiple times — stack 'em up, no cap ✨

The contents of the included file are inserted immediately, as if they had been found at the location of the include directive. If the value of the variable is a relative path, the path is considered to be relative to the configuration file in which the include directive was found. See below for examples 💖

🔮 Conditional includes 🔮

You can conditionally include a config file from another by setting an includeIf.<condition>.path variable to the name of the file to be included.

The condition starts with a keyword followed by a colon and some data whose format and meaning depends on the keyword. Supported keywords are:

🦋 `gitdir`

The data that follows the keyword gitdir and a colon is used as a glob pattern. If the location of the .git directory matches the pattern, the include condition is met ✅

The .git location may be auto-discovered, or come from $GIT_DIR environment variable. If the repository is auto-discovered via a .git file (e.g. from submodules, or a linked worktree), the .git location would be the final location where the .git directory is, not where the .git file is. Lowkey important, don't get it twisted.

The pattern can contain standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple path components. Please refer to gitignore(5) for details. For convenience:

If the pattern starts with ~/, ~ will be substituted with the content of the environment variable HOME.
If the pattern starts with ./, it is replaced with the directory containing the current config file.
If the pattern does not start with either ~/, ./ or /, **/ will be automatically prepended. For example, the pattern foo/bar becomes **/foo/bar and would match /any/path/to/foo/bar.
If the pattern ends with /, ** will be automatically added. For example, the pattern foo/ becomes foo/**. In other words, it matches "foo" and everything inside, recursively. Obsessed 🌀

💜 `gitdir/i`

This is the same as gitdir except that matching is done case-insensitively (e.g. on case-insensitive file systems).

🌈 `worktree`

The data that follows the keyword worktree and a colon is used as a glob pattern. If the working directory of the current worktree matches the pattern, the include condition is met 🌳

The worktree location is the path where files are checked out (as returned by git rev-parse --show-toplevel). This is different from gitdir, which matches the .git directory path. In a linked worktree, the worktree path is the directory where that worktree's files are located, not the main repository's .git directory.

The pattern uses the same glob syntax as gitdir (including ~/, ./, **/, and trailing-/ prefix matching). This condition will never match in a bare repository (which has no worktree) 💀

Unlike gitdir, the worktree condition currently matches only the realpath-resolved worktree location. If the working tree was entered via a symbolic link, a pattern that uses the symbolic-link spelling may not match; use the real path instead. Genuinely, use the real path 🙏

This is useful when you want to apply configuration based on where the working tree is located on the filesystem. For example, a contributor who works on the same project both personally and as an employee can use different user.name and user.email values depending on which directory the worktree is checked out under:

[includeIf "worktree:/home/user/work/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/work.inc
[includeIf "worktree:/home/user/personal/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/personal.inc

While extensions.worktreeConfig (see git-worktree(1)) also supports per-worktree configuration, it stores the config inside each repository's .git/config.worktree file and requires running git config --worktree inside each worktree individually. In contrast, includeIf "worktree:..." can be set once in a global or system-level configuration file (e.g. ~/.config/git/config) and applies to all repositories at once based on their worktree location. Set it once, eat forever 👑

🧚 `worktree/i`

This is the same as worktree except that matching is done case-insensitively (e.g. on case-insensitive file systems).

🍓 `onbranch`

The data that follows the keyword onbranch and a colon is taken to be a pattern with standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple path components. If we are in a worktree where the name of the branch that is currently checked out matches the pattern, the include condition is met 🌿

If the pattern ends with /, ** will be automatically added. For example, the pattern foo/ becomes foo/**. In other words, it matches all branches that begin with foo/. This is useful if your branches are organized hierarchically and you would like to apply a configuration to all the branches in that hierarchy — literally made for the hierarchical girlies 💅

⭐ `hasconfig:remote.*.url`

The data that follows this keyword and a colon is taken to be a pattern with standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple components. The first time this keyword is seen, the rest of the config files will be scanned for remote URLs (without applying any values). If there exists at least one remote URL that matches this pattern, the include condition is met.

🚨 Files included by this option (directly or indirectly) are not allowed to contain remote URLs. That's a hard no.

Note that unlike other includeIf conditions, resolving this condition relies on information that is not yet known at the point of reading the condition. A typical use case is this option being present as a system-level or global-level config, and the remote URL being in a local-level config; hence the need to scan ahead when resolving this condition. In order to avoid the chicken-and-egg problem in which potentially-included files can affect whether such files are potentially included, Git breaks the cycle by prohibiting these files from affecting the resolution of these conditions (thus, prohibiting them from declaring remote URLs). Chicken, egg, cycle broken, problem solved 🐔🥚

As for the naming of this keyword, it is for forwards compatibility with a naming scheme that supports more variable-based include conditions, but currently Git only supports the exact keyword described above. Don't invent variants, bestie, they won't work 😭

A few more notes on matching via gitdir and gitdir/i:

Symlinks in $GIT_DIR are not resolved before matching.
Both the symlink & realpath versions of paths will be matched outside of $GIT_DIR. E.g. if ~/git is a symlink to /mnt/storage/git, both gitdir:~/git and gitdir:/mnt/storage/git will match.

This was not the case in the initial release of this feature in v2.13.0, which only matched the realpath version. Configuration that wants to be compatible with the initial release of this feature needs to either specify only the realpath version, or both versions.

Note that "../" is not special and will match literally, which is unlikely what you want. Like, bestie, it will match the literal characters. You do not want that 🙈

🎀 Example 🎀

# Core variables
[core]
    ; Don't trust file modes
    filemode = false

# Our diff algorithm
[diff]
    external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
    renames = true

[branch "devel"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/devel

# Proxy settings
[core]
    gitProxy="ssh" for "kernel.org"
    gitProxy=default-proxy ; for the rest

[include]
    path = /path/to/foo.inc ; include by absolute path
    path = foo.inc ; find "foo.inc" relative to the current file
    path = ~/foo.inc ; find "foo.inc" in your `$HOME` directory

; include if $GIT_DIR is /path/to/foo/.git
[includeIf "gitdir:/path/to/foo/.git"]
    path = /path/to/foo.inc

; include for all repositories inside /path/to/group
[includeIf "gitdir:/path/to/group/"]
    path = /path/to/foo.inc

; include for all repositories inside $HOME/to/group
[includeIf "gitdir:~/to/group/"]
    path = /path/to/foo.inc

; include if the worktree is at /path/to/project-build
[includeIf "worktree:/path/to/project-build"]
    path = build-config.inc

; include for all worktrees inside /path/to/group
[includeIf "worktree:/path/to/group/"]
    path = group-config.inc

; relative paths are always relative to the including
; file (if the condition is true); their location is not
; affected by the condition
[includeIf "gitdir:/path/to/group/"]
    path = foo.inc

; include only if we are in a worktree where foo-branch is
; currently checked out
[includeIf "onbranch:foo-branch"]
    path = foo.inc

Copy that, screenshot it, tattoo it on your arm, idc — it's the whole include system in one block 🫶✨

           ; include only if a remote with the given URL exists (note
           ; that such a URL may be provided later in a file or in a
           ; file read after this file is read, as seen in this example)
           [includeIf "hasconfig:remote.*.url:https://example.com/**"]
                   path = foo.inc
           [remote "origin"]
                   url = https://example.com/git

So yeah bestie, that's the whole includeIf-if-the-remote-has-a-thing situation. Iconic. Moving on 💅

✨ VALUES ✨

Okay so lots of variables are just plain strings, easy peasy. But some of them are typed — they take values of specific types — and there are actual rules for how you're supposed to spell those. Let's go through them one by one 🎀

🦋 boolean

When a variable "takes a boolean value," there are a bunch of synonyms accepted for true and false. All of them are case-insensitive, no cap.

true

The boolean true literals are yes, on, true, and 1. Also — and this is the sneaky one — a variable that's defined without = <value> at all counts as true.

false

The boolean false literals are no, off, false, 0, and the empty string.

Heads up: when a value gets converted to its canonical form using the --type=bool type specifier, git config will make sure the output is literally "true" or "false" — spelled in lowercase, always. No vibes, just lowercase. ✨

🌸 integer

For the many variables that specify various sizes, the value can be suffixed with k, M, … which means "scale the number by 1024," "by 1024x1024," etc. Math but make it cute 🧮

🎀 color

A variable that takes a color gets a list of colors (at most two — one for foreground, one for background) plus attributes (as many as you want), all separated by spaces.

The basic colors accepted are normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white and default. The first color given is the foreground; the second is the background. All the basic colors except normal and default have a bright variant that you specify by prefixing the color with bright, like brightred. Slay 💅

The color normal makes no change to the color. It's the same as an empty string, but you can use it as the foreground color when you're only specifying a background color — for example, "normal red".

The color default explicitly resets the color to the terminal default — for example, to specify a cleared background. It varies between terminals, but this is usually not the same as setting to "white black".

Colors may also be given as numbers between 0 and 255 — these use ANSI 256-color mode (but note that not all terminals may support this, sowwy 😭). If your terminal supports it, you may also specify 24-bit RGB values as hex, like #ff0ab3, or 12-bit RGB values like #f1b, which is equivalent to the 24-bit color #ff11bb. Fancy!!

The accepted attributes are bold, dim, ul, blink, reverse, italic, and strike (for crossed-out or "strikethrough" letters). The position of any attributes with respect to the colors — before, after, or in between — doesn't matter. Specific attributes may be turned off by prefixing them with no or no- (e.g., noreverse, no-ul, etc).

The pseudo-attribute reset resets all colors and attributes before applying the specified coloring. For example, reset green will result in a green foreground and default background without any active attributes.

An empty color string produces no color effect at all. You can use this to avoid coloring specific elements without disabling color entirely. Sneaky but valid 🫶

For git's pre-defined color slots, the attributes are meant to be reset at the beginning of each item in the colored output. So setting color.decorate.branch to black will paint that branch name in a plain black, even if the previous thing on the same output line (e.g. the opening parenthesis before the list of branch names in log --decorate output) is set to be painted with bold or some other attribute. However, custom log formats may do more complicated and layered coloring, and the negated forms may be useful there. iykyk 💜

🔥 pathname

A variable that takes a pathname value can be given a string that begins with "~/" or "~user/", and the usual tilde expansion happens to such a string: ~/ is expanded to the value of $HOME, and ~user/ to the specified user's home directory. Home sweet home 🏠

If a path starts with %(prefix)/, the remainder is interpreted as a path relative to Git's "runtime prefix" — i.e. relative to the location where Git itself was installed. For example, %(prefix)/bin/ refers to the directory in which the Git executable itself lives. If Git was compiled without runtime prefix support, the compiled-in prefix will be substituted instead. And in the unlikely event that a literal path needs to be specified that should not be expanded, it needs to be prefixed by ./, like so: ./%(prefix)/bin. Note the little ./ — it's doing important work there, don't @ me 🙈

If prefixed with :(optional), the configuration variable is treated as if it does not exist, if the named path does not exist. Ghosted, basically 👻

💜 VARIABLES 💜

Real talk: this list is non-comprehensive and not necessarily complete. For command-specific variables, you'll find a more detailed description in the appropriate manual page, bestie. Go look, it's there.

Other git-related tools may — and do — use their own variables. When you're inventing new variables for use in your own tool, make sure their names do not conflict with those used by Git itself and other popular tools, and describe them in your documentation. Naming collisions are not the vibe 😤

🍓 `add.ignoreErrors`, `add.ignore-errors` (deprecated)

Tells git add to continue adding files when some files can't be added due to indexing errors. Equivalent to the --ignore-errors option of git-add(1).

add.ignore-errors is deprecated, because it doesn't follow the usual naming convention for configuration variables. It's giving "we don't do that here anymore" 💀

⭐ `advice.*`

These variables control various optional help messages designed to aid new users. When left unconfigured, Git will give the message alongside instructions on how to squelch it. You can tell Git you've understood the issue and no longer need a specific help message by setting the corresponding variable to false. Basically: "thanks bestie, I got it" 🫶

As they're intended to help human users, these messages are output to the standard error. When tools that run Git as a subprocess find them disruptive, they can set GIT_ADVICE=0 in the environment to squelch all advice messages. Boom, silence ✨

addEmbeddedRepo — Shown when the user accidentally adds one git repo inside of another. Oops 🫣
addEmptyPathspec — Shown when the user runs git add without providing the pathspec parameter.
addIgnoredFile — Shown when the user attempts to add an ignored file to the index.
amWorkDir — Shown when git-am(1) fails to apply a patch file, to tell the user the location of the file.
ambiguousFetchRefspec — Shown when a fetch refspec for multiple remotes maps to the same remote-tracking branch namespace and causes branch tracking set-up to fail.
checkoutAmbiguousRemoteBranchName — Shown when the argument to git-checkout(1) and git-switch(1) ambiguously resolves to a remote tracking branch on more than one remote, in situations where an unambiguous argument would have otherwise caused a remote-tracking branch to be checked out. See the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable for how to set a given remote to be used by default in some situations where this advice would be printed.
commitBeforeMerge — Shown when git-merge(1) refuses to merge to avoid overwriting local changes.
detachedHead — Shown when the user uses git-switch(1) or git-checkout(1) to move to the detached HEAD state, to tell the user how to create a local branch after the fact. Main character energy, no branch attached 😭
diverging — Shown when a fast-forward is not possible.
fetchRemoteHEADWarn — Shown when git-fetch(1) reveals that a remote HEAD differs from what is set locally, and the user has opted into receiving a warning in this situation.
fetchShowForcedUpdates — Shown when git-fetch(1) takes a long time to calculate forced updates after ref updates, or to warn that the check is disabled.
forceDeleteBranch — Shown when the user tries to delete a not fully merged branch without the force option set.
ignoredHook — Shown when a hook is ignored because the hook is not set as executable.
implicitIdentity — Shown when the user's information is guessed from the system username and domain name, to tell the user how to set their identity configuration.
mergeConflict — Shown when various commands stop because of conflicts. The drama 💀
nestedTag — Shown when a user attempts to recursively tag a tag object.
pushAlreadyExists — Shown when git-push(1) rejects an update that does not qualify for fast-forwarding (e.g., a tag.)
pushFetchFirst — Shown when git-push(1) rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object we do not have.
pushNeedsForce — Shown when git-push(1) rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object that is not a commit-ish, or make the remote ref point at an object that is not a commit-ish.
pushNonFFCurrent — Shown when git-push(1) fails due to a non-fast-forward update to the current branch.
pushNonFFMatching — Shown when the user ran git-push(1) and pushed "matching refs" explicitly (i.e. used :, or specified a refspec that isn't the current branch) and it resulted in a non-fast-forward error.
pushRefNeedsUpdate — Shown when git-push(1) rejects a forced update of a branch when its remote-tracking ref has updates that we do not have locally.
pushRepoLooksLikeRef — Shown when the repository given to git-push(1) is not a configured remote but looks like a <remote>/<branch> ref, suggesting that the remote and branch be given as separate arguments.
pushUnqualifiedRefname — Shown when git-push(1) gives up trying to guess, based on the source and destination refs, what remote ref namespace the source belongs in — but where we can still suggest that the user push to either refs/heads/* or refs/tags/* based on the type of the source object.
pushUpdateRejected — Set this variable to false if you want to disable pushNonFFCurrent, pushNonFFMatching, pushAlreadyExists, pushFetchFirst, pushNeedsForce, and pushRefNeedsUpdate all at the same time. One switch, six silences. Efficiency queen 👑

okay bestie, continuing the advice.* keys — these are the lil' pop-up helpers that explain what's going down and how to fix it 💅✨

rebaseTodoError — lowkey shows up when there's an error after editing the rebase todo list. 😭
refSyntax — appears when you give an illegal ref name, and it's like "hey bestie, here's the ref syntax documentation" 📚
resetNoRefresh — shown when git-reset(1) takes more than 2 seconds to refresh the index after reset, telling you that you can use the --no-refresh option. ⏱️
resolveConflict — shown by various commands when conflicts prevent the operation from being performed. 💀
rmHints — shown on failure in the output of git-rm(1), giving directions on how to proceed from the current state. 🧭
sequencerInUse — shown when a sequencer command is already in progress. 🎬
skippedCherryPicks — shown when git-rebase(1) skips a commit that has already been cherry-picked onto the upstream branch. 🍒
sparseIndexExpanded — shown when a sparse index is expanded to a full index, which is likely due to an unexpected set of files existing outside of the sparse-checkout. 🕵️
statusAheadBehind — shown when git-status(1) computes the ahead/behind counts for a local ref compared to its remote tracking ref, and that calculation takes longer than expected. Will not appear if status.aheadBehind is false or the option --no-ahead-behind is given. 📊
statusHints — show directions on how to proceed from the current state in the output of git-status(1), in the template shown when writing commit messages in git-commit(1), and in the help message shown by git-switch(1) or git-checkout(1) when switching branches. 🧭
statusUoption — shown when git-status(1) takes more than 2 seconds to enumerate untracked files, to tell you that you can use the -u option. ⏳
submoduleAlternateErrorStrategyDie — shown when a submodule.alternateErrorStrategy option configured to "die" causes a fatal error. 💀
submoduleMergeConflict — advice shown when a non-trivial submodule merge conflict is encountered. 😵
submodulesNotUpdated — shown when you run a submodule command that fails because git submodule update --init was not run. 🙈
suggestDetachingHead — shown when git-switch(1) refuses to detach HEAD without the explicit --detach option. 🫶
updateSparsePath — shown when either git-add(1) or git-rm(1) is asked to update index entries outside the current sparse checkout. 📂
waitingForEditor — shown when Git is waiting for editor input. Relevant when e.g. the editor is not launched inside the terminal. ✍️
worktreeAddOrphan — shown when you try to create a worktree from an invalid reference, to tell you how to create a new unborn branch instead. 🌱

alias.*, alias.*.command — command aliases for the git(1) command wrapper. Aliases can be defined using two syntaxes:

Without a subsection, e.g., [alias] co = checkout. The alias name ("co" in this example) is limited to ASCII alphanumeric characters and -, and is matched case-insensitively.
With a subsection, e.g., [alias "co"] command = checkout. The alias name can contain any characters (except for newlines and NUL bytes), including UTF-8, and is matched case-sensitively as raw bytes. You define the action of the alias in the command.

Examples:

# Without subsection (ASCII alphanumeric and dash only)
[alias]
    co = checkout
    st = status

# With subsection (allows any characters, including UTF-8)
[alias "hämta"]
    command = fetch
[alias "rätta till"]
    command = commit --amend

With a Git alias defined, e.g.,

$ git config --global alias.last "cat-file commit HEAD"
# Which is equivalent to
$ git config --global alias.last.command "cat-file commit HEAD"

git last is equivalent to git cat-file commit HEAD.

To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing Git commands are ignored except for deprecated commands. Arguments are split by spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping are supported. A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.

Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the invocation of git. In particular, this is useful when used with -c to pass in one-time configurations or -p to force pagination. For example, loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase can be defined such that running git loud-rebase would be equivalent to git -c commit.verbose=true rebase. Also, ps = -p status would be a helpful alias since git ps would paginate the output of git status where the original command does not.

If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD, the invocation git new is equivalent to running the shell command gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD. Note:

Shell commands will be executed from the top-level directory of a repository, which may not necessarily be the current directory.
GIT_PREFIX is set as returned by running git rev-parse --show-prefix from the original current directory. See git-rev-parse(1).
Shell command aliases always receive any extra arguments provided to the Git command-line as positional arguments.
- Care should be taken if your shell alias is a "one-liner" script with multiple commands (e.g. in a pipeline), references multiple arguments, or is otherwise not able to handle positional arguments added at the end. For example: alias.cmd = "!echo $1 | grep $2" called as git cmd 1 2 will be executed as echo $1 | grep $2 1 2, which is not what you want. 💀
- A convenient way to deal with this is to write your script operations in an inline function that is then called with any arguments from the command-line. For example alias.cmd = "!c() { echo $1 | grep $2 ; }; c" will correctly execute the prior example. 🫶
- Setting GIT_TRACE=1 can help you debug the command being run for your alias. 🔍

am.keepcr — if true, git-am(1) will call git-mailsplit(1) for patches in mbox format with parameter --keep-cr. In this case git-mailsplit(1) will not remove \r from lines ending with \r\n. Can be overridden by giving --no-keep-cr from the command line. ✂️
am.threeWay — by default, git-am(1) will fail if the patch does not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git-am(1) to fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally (equivalent to giving the --3way option from the command line). Defaults to false. 🔀
am.messageId — add a Message-ID trailer based on the email header to the commit when using git-am(1) (see git-interpret-trailers(1)). See also the --message-id and --no-message-id options. 📧
apply.ignoreWhitespace — when set to change, tells git apply to ignore changes in whitespace, in the same way as the --ignore-space-change option. When set to one of: no, none, never, false, it tells git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See git-apply(1). ⚪
apply.whitespace — tells git apply how to handle whitespace, in the same way as the --whitespace option. See git-apply(1). 🌬️
attr.tree — a reference to a tree in the repository from which to read attributes, instead of the .gitattributes file in the working tree. If the value does not resolve to a valid tree object, an empty tree is used instead. When the GIT_ATTR_SOURCE environment variable or --attr-source command line option are used, this configuration variable has no effect. 🌳

Note 💀 The configuration options in bitmapPseudoMerge.* are considered EXPERIMENTAL and may be subject to change or be removed entirely in the future. For more information about the pseudo-merge bitmap feature, see the "Pseudo-merge bitmaps" section of gitpacking(7). 🧪

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.pattern — regular expression used to match reference names. Commits pointed to by references matching this pattern (and meeting the below criteria, like bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate and bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold) will be considered for inclusion in a pseudo-merge bitmap.

Commits are grouped into pseudo-merge groups based on whether or not any reference(s) that point at a given commit match the pattern, which is an extended regular expression.

Within a pseudo-merge group, commits may be further grouped into sub-groups based on the capture groups in the pattern. These sub-groupings are formed from the regular expressions by concatenating any capture groups from the regular expression, with a - dash in between.

For example, if the pattern is refs/tags/, then all tags (provided they meet the below criteria) will be considered candidates for the same pseudo-merge group. However, if the pattern is instead refs/remotes/([0-9])+/tags/, then tags from different remotes will be grouped into separate pseudo-merge groups, based on the remote number. 🏷️

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.decay — determines the rate at which consecutive pseudo-merge bitmap groups decrease in size. Must be non-negative. This parameter can be thought of as k in the function f(n) = C * n^-k, where f(n) is the size of the nth group.

Setting the decay rate equal to 0 will cause all groups to be the same size. Setting the decay rate equal to 1 will cause the nth group to be 1/n the size of the initial group. Higher values of the decay rate cause consecutive groups to shrink at an increasing rate. The default is 1.

If all groups are the same size, it is possible that groups containing newer commits will be able to be used less often than earlier groups, since it is more likely that the references pointing at newer commits will be updated more often than a reference pointing at an old commit. 📉

Okay so next up we're getting into the bitmap pseudo-merge stuff, which honestly sounds fake but isn't, and then it's blame and branch hours 💅

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate`

This one decides what proportion of non-bitmapped commits (among reference tips) get picked to be included in an unstable pseudo-merge bitmap. The value must be greater than 0 and less than or equal to 1, no exceptions bestie. The default is 1.

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold`

Sets the minimum age of non-bitmapped commits (again, among reference tips, same as above) that are candidates for inclusion in an unstable pseudo-merge bitmap. Default is 1.week.ago.

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.maxMerges`

Sets the maximum number of pseudo-merge commits among which commits may be distributed.

Okay so this one has lore 👀 so listen up:

For pseudo-merge groups whose pattern does not contain any capture groups, this setting is applied to all commits matching the regular expression.
For patterns that have one or more capture groups, this setting is applied for each distinct capture group.

Example time, because yes:

If your capture group is refs/tags/, then this setting will distribute all tags into a maximum of maxMerges pseudo-merge commits.
But if your capture group is, say, refs/remotes/([0-9]+)/tags/, then this setting gets applied to each remote's set of tags individually. Iconic tbh.

Must be non-negative. The default value is 64.

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableThreshold`

Sets the minimum age of commits (among reference tips, as above — but heads up, stable commits are still considered candidates even when they've been covered by a bitmap) that are candidates for a stable pseudo-merge bitmap. The default is 1.month.ago.

Setting this threshold to a smaller value (e.g. 1.week.ago) will cause more stable groups to be generated — which imposes a one-time generation cost — but those groups will likely become stale over time. Using a larger value incurs the opposite penalty: fewer stable groups, but they're more useful. Trade-offs, we love them 🫶

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableSize`

Sets the size (in number of commits) of a stable pseudo-merge bitmap. The default is 512.

`blame.blankBoundary`

Show blank commit object name for boundary commits in git-blame(1). Defaults to false.

`blame.coloring`

This one determines the coloring scheme applied to blame output. It can be repeatedLines, highlightRecent, or none — and none is the default.

`blame.date`

Specifies the format used to output dates in git-blame(1). If unset, the iso format is used. For supported values, go check out the discussion of the --date option at git-log(1).

`blame.showEmail`

Show the author email instead of the author name in git-blame(1). Defaults to false.

`blame.showRoot`

Do not treat root commits as boundaries in git-blame(1). Defaults to false.

`blame.ignoreRevsFile`

Ignore revisions listed in the file — one unabbreviated object name per line — in git-blame(1). Whitespace and comments beginning with # are ignored. This option may be repeated multiple times. Empty file names will reset the list of ignored revisions. And heads up: this option is handled before the command line option --ignore-revs-file.

`blame.markUnblamableLines`

Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we could not attribute to another commit with a * in the output of git-blame(1).

`blame.markIgnoredLines`

Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we did attribute to another commit with a ? in the output of git-blame(1).

`branch.autoSetupMerge`

Tells git branch, git switch and git checkout to set up new branches so that git-pull(1) will appropriately merge from the starting point branch. Real talk: even if this option isn't set, the behaviour can still be chosen per-branch using the --track and --no-track options. This option defaults to true. The valid settings are:

false — no automatic setup is done.
true — automatic setup is done when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch.
always — automatic setup is done when the starting point is either a local branch or remote-tracking branch.
inherit — if the starting point has a tracking configuration, it is copied to the new branch.
simple — automatic setup is done only when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch and the new branch has the same name as the remote branch.

`branch.autoSetupRebase`

When a new branch is created with git branch, git switch or git checkout that tracks another branch, this variable tells Git to set up pull to rebase instead of merge (see branch.<name>.rebase). The valid settings are:

never — rebase is never automatically set to true.
local — rebase is set to true for tracked branches of other local branches.
remote — rebase is set to true for tracked branches of remote-tracking branches.
always — rebase will be set to true for all tracking branches.

See branch.autoSetupMerge for the deets on how to set up a branch to track another branch. This option defaults to never.

`branch.sort`

This variable controls the sort ordering of branches when displayed by git-branch(1). Without the --sort=<value> option provided, the value of this variable gets used as the default. See git-for-each-ref(1) field names for valid values.

`branch.<name>.remote`

When you're on branch <name>, this tells git fetch and git push which remote to fetch from or push to. The remote to push to may be overridden with remote.pushDefault (for all branches). The remote to push to, for the current branch, may be further overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote.

If no remote is configured, or if you're not on any branch and there's more than one remote defined in the repository, it defaults to origin for fetching and remote.pushDefault for pushing.

Also ✨ . (a period) is the current local repository (a dot-repository) — see branch.<name>.merge's final note below.

`branch.<name>.pushRemote`

When on branch <name>, it overrides branch.<name>.remote for pushing. It also overrides remote.pushDefault for pushing from branch <name>.

The classic scenario: you pull from one place (e.g. your upstream) and push to another place (e.g. your own publishing repository) — that's when you'd want to set remote.pushDefault to specify the remote to push to for all branches, and then use this option to override it for one specific branch. The value may be the name of a configured remote or a repository URL.

`branch.<name>.merge`

Defines, together with branch.<name>.remote, the upstream branch for the given branch. It tells git fetch/git pull/git rebase which branch to merge, and can also affect git push (see push.default).

When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default refspec to be marked for merging in FETCH_HEAD. The value is handled like the remote part of a refspec, and must match a ref which is fetched from the remote given by branch.<name>.remote.

The merge information is used by git pull (which first calls git fetch) to look up the default branch for merging. Without this option, git pull defaults to merging the first refspec fetched. Specify multiple values to get an octopus merge 🐙 (yes that's the real name).

If you wish to set up git pull so that it merges into <name> from another branch in the local repository, you can point branch.<name>.merge to the desired branch, and use the relative path setting . (a period) for branch.<name>.remote.

`branch.<name>.mergeOptions`

Sets default options for merging into branch <name>. The syntax and supported options are the same as those of git-merge(1), but option values containing whitespace characters are currently not supported. Noted 💀

`branch.<name>.rebase`

When true, rebase the branch <name> on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when git pull is run. See pull.rebase if you wanna do this in a non-branch-specific manner.

When merges (or just m) — pass the --rebase-merges option to git rebase so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see git-rebase(1) for details).
When the value is interactive (or just i) — the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see git-rebase(1) for details). Like, genuinely, do not just vibe your way into this one 😭

`branch.<name>.description`

Branch description. Can be edited with git branch --edit-description. The branch description is automatically added to the format-patch cover letter or request-pull summary. Cute.

`branch.<name>.deleteMerged`

If set to false, branch <name> is exempt from git branch --delete-merged. Super useful for a topic branch you intend to keep developing further after an initial round has been merged upstream. Defaults to true. Explicit deletion via git branch -d is unaffected.

`browser.<tool>.cmd`

Specify the command to invoke the specified browser. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the URLs passed as arguments. (See git-web--browse(1).)

`browser.<tool>.path`

Override the path for the given tool that may be used to browse HTML help (see -w option in git-help(1)) or a working repository in gitweb (see git-instaweb(1)).

`bundle.*`

The bundle.* keys may appear in a bundle list file found via the git clone --bundle-uri option. These keys currently have no effect if placed in a repository config file, though this will change in the future. See the bundle URI design document[1] for more details.

`bundle.version`

This integer value advertises the version of the bundle list format used by the bundle list. Currently, the only accepted value is 1.

`bundle.mode`

This string value should be either all or any. It describes whether all of the advertised bundles are required to unbundle a complete understanding of the bundled information (all), or if any one of the listed bundle URIs is sufficient (any).

`bundle.heuristic`

If this string-valued key exists, then the bundle list is designed to work well with incremental git fetch commands. The heuristic signals that there are additional keys available for each bundle that help determine which subset of bundles the client should download. The only value currently understood is creationToken.

bundle.<id>.* — these keys describe one single item in the bundle list, all grouped under <id> so you can tell them apart, iykyk 💅
bundle.<id>.uri — this string value sets the URI through which Git can actually reach the contents of this <id>. And fun fact: that URI can be a bundle file or another bundle list. nesting era 🪆
checkout.defaultRemote — okay so picture this: you run git checkout <something> or git switch <something>, you've only got one remote, and Git just kind of implicitly falls back on checking out and tracking, like, origin/<something>. Cute! But the second you have more than one remote with a <something> reference? That whole thing stops working 😭. This setting lets you name a preferred remote that always wins the disambiguation game. The typical use-case is setting it to origin.

As of right now, git-switch(1) and git-checkout(1) use it when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> is gonna checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and git-worktree(1) uses it when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. Could other checkout-like commands or functionality use it later? Possibly. No promises, bestie 🫶

checkout.guess — hands you the default value for the --guess or --no-guess option in git checkout and git switch. Go see git-switch(1) and git-checkout(1) ✨
checkout.workers — the number of parallel workers used when updating the working tree. Default is one, aka sequential execution, one at a time, very chill of it. If you set it to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers as there are logical cores available 🔥. This setting and checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect, like, every command that performs checkout — e.g. checkout, clone, reset, sparse-checkout, etc.

Note — parallel checkout usually delivers better perf for repos sitting on SSDs or over NFS. But for repos on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default sequential checkout often performs better. Also the size and compression level of a repository might influence how well the parallel version performs. vibe check your hardware first, fr fr 💀

checkout.thresholdForParallelism — when you're running parallel checkout on just a small number of files, the cost of spawning subprocesses and doing inter-process communication might legit outweigh the parallelization gains, no cap. This setting lets you define the minimum number of files for which parallel checkout should even be attempted. Default is 100 🎀
clean.requireForce — a boolean that makes git-clean refuse to delete files unless you pass -f. Defaults to true, so yes, it's protecting you from yourself 🫶
clone.defaultRemoteName — the name of the remote to create when cloning a repository. Defaults to origin. You can override it by passing the --origin command-line option to git-clone(1) ✨
clone.rejectShallow — rejects cloning a repository if it's a shallow one. Can be overridden by passing the --reject-shallow option on the command line. See git-clone(1) 🚫
clone.filterSubmodules — if a partial clone filter is provided (see --filter in git-rev-list(1)) and --recurse-submodules is used, then the filter gets applied to submodules too. equal treatment, we love to see it 💖
color.advice — a boolean to enable/disable color in hints (e.g. when a push failed — see advice.* for a whole list of them). May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🌈
color.advice.hint — use a customized color for hints 💅
color.blame.highlightRecent — specifies the line annotation color for git blame --color-by-age, depending on the age of the line. Age-based color-coding?? main character energy fr 👑

This setting should be set to a comma-separated list of color and date settings, starting and ending with a color, and the dates should be set from oldest to newest. The metadata gets colored with the specified colors if the line was introduced before the given timestamp, overwriting older timestamped colors.

Instead of an absolute timestamp, relative timestamps work as well — e.g. 2.weeks.ago is valid to address anything older than 2 weeks ✨

It defaults to blue,12 month ago,white,1 month ago,red, which colors everything older than one year blue, keeps recent changes between one month and one year old white, and colors lines introduced within the last month red. a whole little heatmap, obsessed 🍓

color.blame.repeatedLines — use the specified color to colorize line annotations for git blame --color-lines, if they come from the same commit as the preceding line. Defaults to cyan 💙
color.branch — a boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-branch(1). May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🦋
color.branch.<slot> — use a customized color for branch coloration. <slot> is one of current (the current branch), local (a local branch), remote (a remote-tracking branch in refs/remotes/), upstream (upstream tracking branch), plain (other refs) 🎀
color.diff — whether to use ANSI escape sequences to add color to patches. If this is set to always, git-diff(1), git-log(1), and git-show(1) will use color for all patches. If it's set to true or auto, those commands will only use color when the output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

Heads up though: this does not affect git-format-patch(1) or the git-diff-* plumbing commands. And it can be overridden on the command line with the --color[=<when>] option 💅

color.diff.<slot> — use a customized color for diff colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the patch gets the color, and is one of:
- context — context text (plain is a historical synonym)
- meta — metainformation
- frag — hunk header
- func — function in hunk header
- old — removed lines
- new — added lines
- commit — commit headers
- whitespace — highlighting whitespace errors
- oldMoved — deleted lines
- newMoved — added lines
- oldMovedDimmed, oldMovedAlternative, oldMovedAlternativeDimmed, newMovedDimmed, newMovedAlternative, newMovedAlternativeDimmed — see the <mode> setting of --color-moved in git-diff(1) for the details
- contextDimmed, oldDimmed, newDimmed, contextBold, oldBold, and newBold — see git-range-diff(1) for the details

that's a lot of slots but we don't skip any of them around here 💖

color.decorate.<slot> — use a customized color for git log --decorate output. <slot> is one of branch, remoteBranch, tag, stash or HEAD for local branches, remote-tracking branches, tags, stash and HEAD, respectively — and grafted for grafted commits 🌸
color.grep — when set to always, always highlight matches. When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use color only when the output is written to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) ✨
color.grep.<slot> — use a customized color for grep colorization. <slot> says which part of the line gets the color, and is one of:
- context — non-matching text in context lines (when using -A, -B, or -C)
- filename — filename prefix (when not using -h)
- function — function name lines (when using -p)
- lineNumber — line number prefix (when using -n)
- column — column number prefix (when using --column)
- match — matching text (same as setting matchContext and matchSelected)
- matchContext — matching text in context lines
- matchSelected — matching text in selected lines. Also used to customize the following git-log(1) subcommands: --grep, --author, and --committer.
- selected — non-matching text in selected lines. Also used to customize the following git-log(1) subcommands: --grep, --author and --committer.
- separator — separators between fields on a line (:, -, and =) and between hunks (--)
color.interactive — when set to always, always use colors for interactive prompts and displays (like the ones git-add --interactive and git-clean --interactive use). When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use colors only when the output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🎀
color.interactive.<slot> — use a customized color for git add --interactive and git clean --interactive output. <slot> may be prompt, header, help or error, covering four distinct types of normal output from interactive commands 💅
color.pager — a boolean specifying whether auto color modes should colorize output going to the pager. Defaults to true; set this to false if your pager doesn't understand ANSI color codes (looking at you, weird custom pager) 😭
color.push — a boolean to enable/disable color in push errors. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🔥
color.push.error — use a customized color for push errors 💀
color.remote — if set, keywords at the start of the line get highlighted. The keywords are "error", "warning", "hint" and "success", and they're matched case-insensitively. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true). If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🌈
color.remote.<slot> — use a customized color for each remote keyword. <slot> may be hint, warning, success or error, which match the corresponding keyword ⭐
color.showBranch — a boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-show-branch(1). May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🦋
color.status — a boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-status(1). May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default) 🎀
color.status.<slot> — custom colors for status colorization, and <slot> can be literally any of these, bestie:
- header — the header text of the status message
- added or updated — files which are added but not committed
- changed — files which are changed but not added in the index
- untracked — files which are not tracked by Git
- branch — the current branch
- nobranch — the color the no branch warning is shown in, defaulting to red
- localBranch or remoteBranch — the local and remote branch names, respectively, when branch and tracking information is displayed in the status short-format
- unmerged — files which have unmerged changes
color.transport — a boolean to enable/disable color when pushes are rejected 💅. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.transport.rejected — use customized color when a push was rejected 🥀
color.ui — this variable determines the default value for variables such as color.diff and color.grep that control the use of color per command family. Its scope will expand as more commands learn configuration to set a default for the --color option. Set it to false or never if you prefer Git commands not to use color unless enabled explicitly with some other configuration or the --color option. Set it to always if you want all output not intended for machine consumption to use color, to true or auto (this is the default since Git 1.8.4) if you want such output to use color when written to the terminal. ✨
column.ui — specify whether supported commands should output in columns. This variable consists of a list of tokens separated by spaces or commas:

These options control when the feature should be enabled (defaults to never):

always — always show in columns
never — never show in columns
auto — show in columns if the output is to the terminal

These options control layout (defaults to column). Setting any of these implies always if none of always, never, or auto are specified.

column — fill columns before rows
row — fill rows before columns
plain — show in one column

Finally, these options can be combined with a layout option (defaults to nodense):

dense — make unequal size columns to utilize more space
nodense — make equal size columns

column.branch — specify whether to output branch listing in git branch in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.clean — specify the layout when listing items in git clean -i, which always shows files and directories in columns. See column.ui for details. 🧹
column.status — specify whether to output untracked files in git status in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.tag — specify whether to output tag listings in git tag in columns. See column.ui for details.
commit.cleanup — this setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. See git-commit(1) for details. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character in the commit log template yourself, if you do this). 🙈
commit.gpgSign — a boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times. 🔐
commit.status — a boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.
commit.template — specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages. 🎀
commit.verbose — a boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit. See git-commit(1) for details.
commitGraph.generationVersion — specifies the type of generation number version to use when writing or reading the commit-graph file. If version 1 is specified, then the corrected commit dates will not be written or read. Defaults to 2.
commitGraph.maxNewFilters — specifies the default value for the --max-new-filters option of git commit-graph write (c.f., git-commit-graph(1)).
commitGraph.changedPaths — if true, then git commit-graph write will compute and write changed-path Bloom filters by default, equivalent to passing --changed-paths. If false or unset, changed-paths Bloom filters will be written during git commit-graph write only if the filters already exist in the current commit-graph file. This matches the default behavior of git commit-graph write without any --[no-]changed-paths option. To rewrite a commit-graph file without any filters, use the --no-changed-paths option. Command-line option --[no-]changed-paths always takes precedence over this configuration. Defaults to unset.
commitGraph.readChangedPaths — Deprecated. Equivalent to commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=-1 if true, and commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=0 if false. (If commitGraph.changedPathVersion is also set, commitGraph.changedPathsVersion takes precedence.) 👀
commitGraph.changedPathsVersion — specifies the version of the changed-path Bloom filters that Git will read and write. May be -1, 0, 1, or 2. Note that values greater than 1 may be incompatible with older versions of Git which do not yet understand those versions. Use caution when operating in a mixed-version environment.

Defaults to -1.

If -1, Git will use the version of the changed-path Bloom filters in the repository, defaulting to 1 if there are none.
If 0, Git will not read any Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters when instructed to write.
If 1, Git will only read version 1 Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters.
If 2, Git will only read version 2 Bloom filters, and will write version 2 Bloom filters.

See git-commit-graph(1) for more information.

completion.commands — this is only used by git-completion.bash to add or remove commands from the list of completed commands. Normally only porcelain commands and a few select others are completed. You can add more commands, separated by space, in this variable. Prefixing the command with - will remove it from the existing list. 🌸
core.fileMode — tells Git if the executable bit of files in the working tree is to be honored.

Some filesystems lose the executable bit when a file that is marked as executable is checked out, or checks out a non-executable file with executable bit on. git-clone(1) or git-init(1) probe the filesystem to see if it handles the executable bit correctly and this variable is automatically set as necessary.

A repository, however, may be on a filesystem that handles the filemode correctly, and this variable is set to true when created, but later may be made accessible from another environment that loses the filemode (e.g. exporting ext4 via CIFS mount, visiting a Cygwin created repository with Git for Windows or Eclipse). In such a case it may be necessary to set this variable to false. See git-update-index(1).

The default is true (when core.filemode is not specified in the config file).

core.hideDotFiles — (Windows-only 🪟) If true, mark newly-created directories and files whose name starts with a dot as hidden. If dotGitOnly, only the .git/ directory is hidden, but no other files starting with a dot. The default mode is dotGitOnly.
core.ignoreCase — internal variable which enables various workarounds to enable Git to work better on filesystems that are not case sensitive, like APFS, HFS+, FAT, NTFS, etc. For example, if a directory listing finds "makefile" when Git expects "Makefile", Git will assume it is really the same file, and continue to remember it as "Makefile".

The default is false, except git-clone(1) or git-init(1) will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.

Git relies on the proper configuration of this variable for your operating and file system. Modifying this value may result in unexpected behavior. ⚠️

core.precomposeUnicode — this option is only used by Mac OS implementation of Git. When core.precomposeUnicode=true, Git reverts the unicode decomposition of filenames done by Mac OS. This is useful when sharing a repository between Mac OS and Linux or Windows. (Git for Windows 1.7.10 or higher is needed, or Git under cygwin 1.7). When false, file names are handled fully transparent by Git, which is backward compatible with older versions of Git. 🍓
core.protectHFS — if set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would be considered equivalent to .git on an HFS+ filesystem. Defaults to true on Mac OS, and false elsewhere. 🛡️
core.protectNTFS — if set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would cause problems with the NTFS filesystem, e.g. conflict with 8.3 "short" names. Defaults to true on Windows, and false elsewhere. 🛡️
core.fsmonitor — if set to true, enable the built-in file system monitor daemon for this working directory (git-fsmonitor--daemon(1)).

Like hook-based file system monitors, the built-in file system monitor can speed up Git commands that need to refresh the Git index (e.g. git status) in a working directory with many files. The built-in monitor eliminates the need to install and maintain an external third-party tool.

The built-in file system monitor is currently available only on a limited set of supported platforms. Currently, this includes Windows and MacOS.

Otherwise, this variable contains the pathname of the "fsmonitor" hook command.

This hook command is used to identify all files that may have changed since the requested date/time. This information is used to speed up git by avoiding unnecessary scanning of files that have not changed.

See the "fsmonitor-watchman" section of githooks(5). 👑

⚠️ ok bestie, real talk first — a warning that is genuinely important if you're juggling multiple Git versions at once (like one on the command line and another inside your IDE, which honestly, same) 💀 the definition of core.fsmonitor got extended to allow boolean values on top of hook pathnames. Which means:

Git 2.35.1 and prior? They do not get the boolean values. They'll look at "true" or "false" and go "ah yes, a hook pathname, let me invoke that" — iconic of them, but wrong.
Git 2.26 thru 2.35.1? They default to hook protocol V2, and they'll fall back to no fsmonitor (aka a full scan).
Git versions prior to 2.26? They default to hook protocol V1 and will silently assume nothing changed at all (no scan), so your status commands may report incomplete results. 😭

So for this reason, it is best to upgrade all of your Git versions before you start using the built-in file system monitor. No cap. ✨

`core.fsmonitorHookVersion`

Sets the protocol version to be used when invoking the "fsmonitor" hook. 🎀

There are currently versions 1 and 2. When this is not set, version 2 will be tried first and if it fails then version 1 will be tried. Version 1 uses a timestamp as input to determine which files have changes since that time, but some monitors like Watchman have race conditions when used with a timestamp 😬. Version 2 uses an opaque string so that the monitor can return something that can be used to determine what files have changed without race conditions. slay.

`core.trustctime`

If false, the ctime differences between the index and the working tree are ignored — super useful when the inode change time is regularly modified by something outside Git (looking at you, file system crawlers and some backup systems 👀). See git-update-index(1). True by default.

`core.splitIndex`

If true, the split-index feature of the index will be used. See git-update-index(1). False by default.

`core.untrackedCache`

Determines what to do about the untracked cache feature of the index 🧚:

It will be kept, if this variable is unset or set to keep.
It will automatically be added if set to true.
And it will automatically be removed, if set to false.

Before you set it to true, please please please check that mtime is working properly on your system 🫶. See git-update-index(1). keep by default, unless feature.manyFiles is enabled, which sets this setting to true by default.

`core.checkStat`

When missing or is set to default, many fields in the stat structure are checked to detect if a file has been modified since Git looked at it. When this configuration variable is set to minimal, the sub-second part of mtime and ctime, the uid and gid of the owner of the file, the inode number (and the device number, if Git was compiled to use it), are excluded from the check among these fields — leaving only the whole-second part of mtime (and ctime, if core.trustCtime is set) and the filesize to be checked. ✨

There are implementations of Git that do not leave usable values in some fields (e.g. JGit); by excluding these fields from the comparison, the minimal mode may help interoperability when the same repository is used by these other systems at the same time. teamwork 💅

`core.quotePath`

Commands that output paths (e.g. ls-files, diff), will quote "unusual" characters in the pathname by enclosing the pathname in double-quotes and escaping those characters with backslashes in the same way C escapes control characters (e.g. \t for TAB, \n for LF, \\ for backslash) or bytes with values larger than 0x80 (e.g. octal \302\265 for "micro" in UTF-8). If this variable is set to false, bytes higher than 0x80 are not considered "unusual" any more. Double-quotes, backslash and control characters are always escaped regardless of the setting of this variable. A simple space character is not considered "unusual". Many commands can output pathnames completely verbatim using the -z option. The default value is true.

`core.eol`

Sets the line ending type to use in the working directory for files that are marked as text (either by having the text attribute set, or by having text=auto and Git auto-detecting the contents as text). Alternatives are lf, crlf and native, which uses the platform's native line ending 🌸. The default value is native. See gitattributes(5) for more information on end-of-line conversion. Note that this value is ignored if core.autocrlf is set to true or input. 👑

`core.safecrlf`

If true, makes Git check if converting CRLF is reversible when end-of-line conversion is active. Git will verify if a command modifies a file in the work tree either directly or indirectly. For example, committing a file followed by checking out the same file should yield the original file in the work tree. If this is not the case for the current setting of core.autocrlf, Git will reject the file. The variable can be set to "warn", in which case Git will only warn about an irreversible conversion but continue the operation. ⚠️

CRLF conversion bears a slight chance of corrupting data. When it is enabled, Git will convert CRLF to LF during commit and LF to CRLF during checkout. A file that contains a mixture of LF and CRLF before the commit cannot be recreated by Git. For text files this is the right thing to do: it corrects line endings such that we have only LF line endings in the repository. But for binary files that are accidentally classified as text, the conversion can corrupt data. 💀

If you recognize such corruption early you can easily fix it by setting the conversion type explicitly in .gitattributes. Right after committing you still have the original file in your work tree and this file is not yet corrupted. You can explicitly tell Git that this file is binary and Git will handle the file appropriately. 🫶

Unfortunately, the desired effect of cleaning up text files with mixed line endings and the undesired effect of corrupting binary files cannot be distinguished. In both cases CRLFs are removed in an irreversible way. For text files this is the right thing to do because CRLFs are line endings, while for binary files converting CRLFs corrupts data. 😭

Note: this safety check does not mean that a checkout will generate a file identical to the original file for a different setting of core.eol and core.autocrlf — only for the current one. For example, a text file with LF would be accepted with core.eol=lf and could later be checked out with core.eol=crlf, in which case the resulting file would contain CRLF, although the original file contained LF. However, in both work trees the line endings would be consistent, that is either all LF or all CRLF, but never mixed. A file with mixed line endings would be reported by the core.safecrlf mechanism. ✨

`core.autocrlf`

Setting this variable to "true" is the same as setting the text attribute to "auto" on all files and core.eol to "crlf". Set to true if you want to have CRLF line endings in your working directory and the repository has LF line endings. This variable can be set to input, in which case no output conversion is performed. 💅

`core.checkRoundtripEncoding`

A comma and/or whitespace separated list of encodings that Git performs UTF-8 round trip checks on if they are used in a working-tree-encoding attribute (see gitattributes(5)). The default value is SHIFT-JIS. 🎀

`core.symlinks`

If false, symbolic links are checked out as small plain files that contain the link text. git-update-index(1) and git-add(1) will not change the recorded type to regular file. Useful on filesystems like FAT that do not support symbolic links. 🦋

The default is true, except git-clone(1) or git-init(1) will probe and set core.symlinks false if appropriate when the repository is created.

`core.gitProxy`

A "proxy command" to execute (as command host port) instead of establishing a direct connection to the remote server when using the Git protocol for fetching. If the variable value is in the "COMMAND for DOMAIN" format, the command is applied only on hostnames ending with the specified domain string. This variable may be set multiple times and is matched in the given order; the first match wins. 🏆

Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_COMMAND environment variable (which always applies universally, without the special "for" handling).

The special string none can be used as the proxy command to specify that no proxy be used for a given domain pattern. This is useful for excluding servers inside a firewall from proxy use, while defaulting to a common proxy for external domains. 🔥

`core.sshCommand`

If this variable is set, git fetch and git push will use the specified command instead of ssh when they need to connect to a remote system. The command is in the same form as the GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable and is overridden when the environment variable is set.

`core.ignoreStat`

If true, Git will avoid using lstat() calls to detect if files have changed by setting the "assume-unchanged" bit for those tracked files which it has updated identically in both the index and working tree.

When files are modified outside of Git, the user will need to stage the modified files explicitly (e.g. see Examples section in git-update-index(1)). Git will not normally detect changes to those files. 🙈

This is useful on systems where lstat() calls are very slow, such as CIFS/Microsoft Windows.

False by default.

`core.preferSymlinkRefs`

Instead of the default "symref" format for HEAD and other symbolic reference files, use symbolic links. This is sometimes needed to work with old scripts that expect HEAD to be a symbolic link.

🚨 This configuration is deprecated and will be removed in Git 3.0. Symbolic refs will always be written as textual symrefs. Don't get attached, bestie.

`core.alternateRefsCommand`

When advertising tips of available history from an alternate, use the shell to execute the specified command instead of git-for-each-ref(1). The first argument is the absolute path of the alternate. Output must contain one hex object id per line (i.e., the same as produced by git for-each-ref --format='%(objectname)'). ⭐

💡 Heads up: you cannot generally put git for-each-ref directly into the config value, as it does not take a repository path as an argument (but you can wrap the command above in a shell script). iykyk 🧚

okay so next up, more core.* settings — these are the ones that lowkey control how your repo behaves under the hood 💅

core.alternateRefsPrefixes — when you're listing refs from an alternate, this says: only show refs that start with the prefix you give it. The prefixes match exactly like they would if you passed them as arguments to git-for-each-ref(1). Wanna list multiple prefixes? Just separate them with whitespace. ✨ but heads up: if core.alternateRefsCommand is set, then setting core.alternateRefsPrefixes literally has no effect. periodt.
core.bare — if this is true, the repo is assumed to be bare and has no working directory attached to it. And when that's the case, a bunch of commands that need a working directory get disabled — like git-add(1) or git-merge(1). 😭 this setting gets automatically guessed by git-clone(1) or git-init(1) when the repo was created. By default, a repo that ends in "/.git" is assumed to be not bare (bare = false), while all other repos are assumed to be bare (bare = true). it's giving "automatic vibe check" ngl.
core.worktree — sets the path to the root of the working tree. 🌳 but if the GIT_COMMON_DIR environment variable is set, then core.worktree is ignored and not used for determining the root of the working tree. this can be overridden by the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the --work-tree command-line option. the value can be an absolute path or relative to the path to the .git directory, which is either specified by --git-dir or GIT_DIR, or automatically discovered. if --git-dir or GIT_DIR is specified but none of --work-tree, GIT_WORK_TREE and core.worktree is specified, then the current working directory is regarded as the top level of your working tree.

⚠️ note: this variable is honored even when set in a configuration file in a ".git" subdirectory of a directory and its value differs from the latter directory (e.g. "/path/to/.git/config" has core.worktree set to "/different/path"), which is most likely a misconfiguration. running Git commands in the "/path/to" directory will still use "/different/path" as the root of the work tree and can cause confusion unless you know what you are doing (e.g. you are creating a read-only snapshot of the same index to a location different from the repository’s usual working tree). bestie, pls don't do this accidentally 💀

core.lockfilePid — if true, Git will create a PID file alongside lock files. when a lock acquisition fails and a PID file exists, Git can provide additional diagnostic information about the process holding the lock, including whether it is still running. defaults to false. the PID file is named by inserting ~pid before the .lock suffix. for example, if the lock file is index.lock, the PID file will be index~pid.lock. the file contains a single line in the format pid <value> followed by a newline. 👑 detective mode: activated.
core.logAllRefUpdates — enables the reflog. updates to a ref <ref> are logged to the file "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>", by appending the new and old SHA-1, the date/time and the reason of the update — but only when the file exists. if this config variable is set to true, a missing "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>" file is automatically created for branch heads (i.e. under refs/heads/), remote refs (i.e. under refs/remotes/), note refs (i.e. under refs/notes/), and the symbolic ref HEAD. if it is set to always, then a missing reflog is automatically created for any ref under refs/. this info can be used to determine what commit was the tip of a branch "2 days ago". 🕰️ this value is true by default in a repository that has a working directory associated with it, and false by default in a bare repository.
core.repositoryFormatVersion — internal variable identifying the repository format and layout version. see gitrepository-layout(5). don't touch unless you know what you're doing, iykyk 🫶
core.sharedRepository — when set to group (or true), the repository is made shareable between several users in a group (making sure all the files and objects are group-writable). when set to all (or world or everybody), the repository will be readable by all users, additionally to being group-shareable. when set to umask (or false), Git will use permissions reported by umask(2). when set to 0xxx, where 0xxx is an octal number, files in the repository will have this mode value. 0xxx will override the user’s umask value (whereas the other options will only override requested parts of the user’s umask value). examples: 0660 will make the repo read/write-able for the owner and group, but inaccessible to others (equivalent to group unless umask is e.g. 0022). 0640 is a repository that is group-readable but not group-writable. see git-init(1). false by default. 💅 permissions are a whole vibe.
core.warnAmbiguousRefs — if true, Git will warn you if the ref name you passed it is ambiguous and might match multiple refs in the repository. true by default. so yes, it's looking out for you 🥺
core.compression — an integer -1..9, indicating a default compression level. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. if set, this provides a default to other compression variables, such as core.looseCompression and pack.compression. 🔥 choose your fighter.
core.looseCompression — an integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects that are not in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. if not set, defaults to core.compression. if that is not set, defaults to 1 (best speed). ⚡ speed over size, bestie.
core.packedGitWindowSize — number of bytes of a pack file to map into memory in a single mapping operation. larger window sizes may allow your system to process a smaller number of large pack files more quickly. smaller window sizes will negatively affect performance due to increased calls to the operating system’s memory manager, but may improve performance when accessing a large number of large pack files. default is 1 MiB if NO_MMAP was set at compile time, otherwise 32 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 1 GiB on 64 bit platforms. this should be reasonable for all users/operating systems. you probably do not need to adjust this value. common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported. 🧚 leave it alone, fr fr.
core.packedGitLimit — maximum number of bytes to map simultaneously into memory from pack files. if Git needs to access more than this many bytes at once to complete an operation it will unmap existing regions to reclaim virtual address space within the process. default is 256 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 32 TiB (effectively unlimited) on 64 bit platforms. this should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. you probably do not need to adjust this value. common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported. 🫶 again: probably don't touch.
core.deltaBaseCacheLimit — maximum number of bytes per thread to reserve for caching base objects that may be referenced by multiple deltified objects. by storing the entire decompressed base objects in a cache Git is able to avoid unpacking and decompressing frequently used base objects multiple times. default is 96 MiB on all platforms. this should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. you probably do not need to adjust this value. common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported. 🌸 caching queen.
core.bigFileThreshold — the size of files considered "big", which as discussed below changes the behavior of numerous git commands, as well as how such files are stored within the repository. the default is 512 MiB. common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported. files above the configured limit will be:
- stored deflated in packfiles, without attempting delta compression. the default limit is primarily set with this use-case in mind. with it, most projects will have their source code and other text files delta compressed, but not larger binary media files. storing large files without delta compression avoids excessive memory usage, at the slight expense of increased disk usage. 💀 big files get special treatment.
- will be treated as if they were labeled "binary" (see gitattributes(5)). e.g. git-log(1) and git-diff(1) will not compute diffs for files above this limit.
- will generally be streamed when written, which avoids excessive memory usage, at the cost of some fixed overhead. commands that make use of this include git-archive(1), git-fast-import(1), git-index-pack(1), git-unpack-objects(1) and git-fsck(1). 🔥 stream team.
core.excludesFile — specifies the pathname to the file that contains patterns to describe paths that are not meant to be tracked, in addition to .gitignore (per-directory) and .git/info/exclude. defaults to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead. see gitignore(5). 🙈 the "not me" list.
core.askPass — some commands (e.g. svn and http interfaces) that interactively ask for a password can be told to use an external program given via the value of this variable. can be overridden by the GIT_ASKPASS environment variable. if not set, fall back to the value of the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable or, failing that, a simple password prompt. the external program shall be given a suitable prompt as command-line argument and write the password on its STDOUT. 🎀 password helper, slay.
core.attributesFile — specifies the pathname to the file that contains attributes (see gitattributes(5)), in addition to .gitattributes (per-directory) and .git/info/attributes. its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/attributes. if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/attributes is used instead. 💜 attributes but make it global.
core.hooksPath — by default Git will look for your hooks in the $GIT_DIR/hooks directory. set this to a different path, e.g. /etc/git/hooks, and Git will try to find your hooks in that directory, e.g. /etc/git/hooks/pre-receive instead of in $GIT_DIR/hooks/pre-receive. the path can be either absolute or relative. a relative path is taken as relative to the directory where the hooks are run (see the "DESCRIPTION" section of githooks(5)). this config variable is useful in cases where you’d like to centrally configure your Git hooks instead of configuring them on a per-repository basis, or as a more flexible and centralized alternative to having an init.templateDir where you’ve changed default hooks. 👑 centralize your hooks, main character energy.

okay one more core.hooksPath thing before we move on: you can also disable all hooks entirely by setting core.hooksPath to /dev/null. That is usually only advisable for expert users, and on a per-command basis using configuration parameters of the form git -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null ... 🫶

core.editor — commands like commit and tag that let you edit messages by launching an editor grab this value, but only when it's set and the GIT_EDITOR environment variable is not set. More deets in git-var(1) ✍️
core.commentChar, core.commentString — commands like commit and tag that let you edit messages treat a line starting with this character as a comment, and strip those lines out after the editor returns (default is #) 🎀

If you set it to auto, git-commit will pick a character that isn't the starting character of any line in your existing commit messages. Support for this value is deprecated and will be removed in Git 3.0, because of these limitations:

it's incompatible with adding comments in a commit message template — and that includes the conflicts comments added to the commit message by cherry-pick, merge, rebase and revert 😬
it's incompatible with adding comments to the commit message in the prepare-commit-msg hook
it's incompatible with the fixup and squash commands when rebasing,
it is not respected by git notes

Heads up: these two variables are aliases of each other, and in modern versions of Git you're free to use a whole string (e.g. // or ⁑⁕⁑) with commentChar. Versions of Git prior to v2.45.0 will ignore commentString but will reject a value of commentChar that's more than a single ASCII byte. So if you plan to use your config with both older and newer versions of Git, you may want to specify both:

[core]
# single character for older versions
commentChar = "#"
# string for newer versions (which will override commentChar
# because it comes later in the file)
commentString = "//"

core.filesRefLockTimeout — how long, in milliseconds, to keep retrying when trying to lock an individual reference. Value 0 means don't retry at all; -1 means try indefinitely. Default is 100 (i.e. retry for 100ms) ⏱️
core.packedRefsTimeout — same energy, but for trying to lock the packed-refs file. Value 0 means no retrying at all; -1 means try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e. retry for 1 second)
core.configLockTimeout — the retry window, in milliseconds, for trying to lock a configuration file for writing. Value 0 means don't retry at all; -1 means try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e. retry for 1 second). This one is read from the configuration that's already on disk before the lock is taken, so you can set it persistently like any other option 🔒
core.pager — the text viewer Git commands use (e.g. less). The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell. Order of preference is: the $GIT_PAGER environment variable, then core.pager config, then $PAGER, and then whatever default was chosen at compile time (usually less) 📖

When the LESS environment variable is unset, Git sets it to FRX (if LESS is set, Git does not change it at all). Want to selectively override Git's default LESS setting? Set core.pager to e.g. less -S. Git passes that to the shell, which translates the final command to LESS=FRX less -S. The environment does not set the S option but the command line does, instructing less to truncate long lines. Similarly, setting core.pager to less -+F deactivates the F option specified by the environment from the command-line, deactivating the "quit if one screen" behavior of less. And you can specifically activate some flags for particular commands: for example, setting pager.blame to less -S enables line truncation only for git blame ✨

Likewise, when the LV environment variable is unset, Git sets it to -c. You can override this setting by exporting LV with another value or setting core.pager to lv +c.

core.whitespace — a comma separated list of common whitespace problems to notice. git diff will use color.diff.whitespace to highlight them, and git apply --whitespace=error will consider them as errors. You can prefix - to disable any of them (e.g. -trailing-space):
- blank-at-eol treats trailing whitespaces at the end of the line as an error (enabled by default) 🧹
- space-before-tab treats a space character that appears immediately before a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (enabled by default)
- indent-with-non-tab treats a line that is indented with space characters instead of the equivalent tabs as an error (not enabled by default)
- tab-in-indent treats a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (not enabled by default)
- blank-at-eof treats blank lines added at the end of file as an error (enabled by default)
- trailing-space is a short-hand to cover both blank-at-eol and blank-at-eof
- cr-at-eol treats a carriage-return at the end of line as part of the line terminator, i.e. with it, trailing-space does not trigger if the character before such a carriage-return is not a whitespace (not enabled by default)
- incomplete-line treats the last line of a file that is missing the newline at the end as an error (not enabled by default)
- tabwidth=<n> tells how many character positions a tab occupies; this is relevant for indent-with-non-tab and when Git fixes tab-in-indent errors. The default tab width is 8. Allowed values are 1 to 63 📏
core.fsync — a comma-separated list of components of the repository that should be hardened via the core.fsyncMethod when created or modified. You can disable hardening of any component by prefixing it with a -. Items that are not hardened may be lost in the event of an unclean system shutdown 😭 Unless you have special requirements, it is recommended that you leave this option empty or pick one of committed, added, or all.

When this configuration is encountered, the set of components starts with the platform default value, disabled components are removed, and additional components are added. none resets the state so that the platform default is ignored.

The empty string resets the fsync configuration to the platform default. The default on most platforms is equivalent to core.fsync=committed,-loose-object, which has good performance, but risks losing recent work in the event of an unclean system shutdown 💀

none clears the set of fsynced components
loose-object hardens objects added to the repo in loose-object form
pack hardens objects added to the repo in packfile form
pack-metadata hardens packfile bitmaps and indexes
commit-graph hardens the commit-graph file
index hardens the index when it is modified
objects is an aggregate option that is equivalent to loose-object,pack
reference hardens references modified in the repo
derived-metadata is an aggregate option that is equivalent to pack-metadata,commit-graph
committed is an aggregate option that is currently equivalent to objects. This mode sacrifices some performance to ensure that work that is committed to the repository with git commit or similar commands is hardened 💪
added is an aggregate option that is currently equivalent to committed,index. This mode sacrifices additional performance to ensure that the results of commands like git add and similar operations are hardened
all is an aggregate option that syncs all individual components above 👑

core.fsyncMethod — a value indicating the strategy Git will use to harden repository data using fsync and related primitives.
- fsync uses the fsync() system call or platform equivalents
- writeout-only issues pagecache writeback requests, but depending on the filesystem and storage hardware, data added to the repository may not be durable in the event of a system crash. This is the default mode on macOS 👀
- batch enables a mode that uses writeout-only flushes to stage multiple updates in the disk writeback cache and then does a single full fsync of a dummy file to trigger the disk cache flush at the end of the operation.

Currently batch mode only applies to loose-object files. Other repository data is made durable as if fsync was specified. This mode is expected to be as safe as fsync on macOS for repos stored on HFS+ or APFS filesystems and on Windows for repos stored on NTFS or ReFS filesystems 🌸

core.fsyncObjectFiles — this boolean will enable fsync() when writing object files. This setting is deprecated. Use core.fsync instead. ⚠️

This setting affects data added to the Git repository in loose-object form. When set to true, Git will issue an fsync or similar system call to flush caches so that loose-objects remain consistent in the face of a unclean system shutdown.

core.preloadIndex — enable parallel index preload for operations like git diff 🚀

This can speed up operations like git diff and git status, especially on filesystems like NFS that have weak caching semantics and thus relatively high IO latencies. When enabled, Git will do the index comparison to the filesystem data in parallel, allowing overlapping IO's. Defaults to true.

core.unsetenvvars — Windows-only: a comma-separated list of environment variables' names that need to be unset before spawning any other process. Defaults to PERL5LIB, to account for the fact that Git for Windows insists on using its own Perl interpreter 🪟
core.createObject — you can set this to link, in which case a hardlink followed by a delete of the source are used to make sure that object creation will not overwrite existing objects.

On some file system/operating system combinations, this is unreliable 😬 Set this config setting to rename there; however, this will remove the check that makes sure that existing object files will not get overwritten. So like… pick your fighter, bestie 💅

core.notesRef — this is the one that says which notes get shown when you're looking at commit messages, bestie. It has to be a fully qualified ref, so no shortcuts 💅. And okay, plot twist: if the ref you named doesn't exist, that's not an error — it just means nothing gets printed, which honestly is a mood. The default is refs/notes/commits, but GIT_NOTES_REF can totally override it. Go read git-notes(1) for the full tea 🫶.
core.commitGraph — set this to true and git will read the commit-graph file (if there even is one) to parse out the commit graph structure. Defaults to <green>true</green> ✨. See git-commit-graph(1) for more.
core.useReplaceRefs — flip this to false and git acts like you handed it the --no-replace-objects option on the command line, no cap. Check git(1) and git-replace(1) for the details 🔥.
core.multiPackIndex — use the multi-pack-index file so you can track a whole bunch of packfiles with one single index. See git-multi-pack-index(1). Defaults to <green>true</green> 🎀.
core.sparseCheckout — turns on the "sparse checkout" feature. See git-sparse-checkout(1) for more 🦋.
core.sparseCheckoutCone — enables "cone mode" for sparse checkout. When your sparse-checkout file only has a limited set of patterns, this mode gives you significant performance advantages, lowkey iconic ⭐. And if you want "non-cone mode" instead so you can specify more flexible patterns, just set this variable to false. See git-sparse-checkout(1) for more.
core.abbrev — sets how long abbreviated object names are. Leave it unspecified or set it to "auto" and git computes an appropriate value based on the approximate number of packed objects in your repo — which, hopefully, is enough to keep the abbreviated object names unique for a while 🙈. Set it to "no" and no abbreviation happens at all, object names show up at full length. Minimum length is 4, periodt.
core.maxTreeDepth — the maximum depth git is willing to recurse while traversing a tree (like, a/b/cde/f has a depth of 4, iykyk). This is a fail-safe so git can abort cleanly, and you should generally not need to touch it. When git is compiled with MSVC the default is 512, otherwise the default is 2048 🧚.
credential.helper — names the external helper to call when a username or password credential is needed. The helper can go dig through external storage so you don't get prompted for your creds 💖. Normally this is the name of a credential helper with possible arguments, but it can also be an absolute path with arguments or, if it's preceded by !, shell commands. Also note: multiple helpers can be defined. See gitcredentials(7) for the details and examples 🫶.
credential.interactive — by default, git and any configured credential helpers will ask you for input when new credentials are required. A lot of these helpers will succeed off stored credentials as long as those creds are still valid. To avoid any possibility of user interactivity from git, set credential.interactive=false. Some credential helpers respect this option too 👑.
credential.useHttpPath — when acquiring credentials, treat the "path" component of an http or https URL as important. Defaults to <red>false</red>. See gitcredentials(7) for more 🌸.
credential.sanitizePrompt — by default, user names and hosts that show up as part of the password prompt aren't allowed to contain control characters (they get URL-encoded by default). Configure this setting to false to override that behavior 💀.
credential.protectProtocol — by default, Carriage Return characters are not allowed in the protocol used when git talks to a credential helper. This setting lets users override that default.
credential.username — if no username is set for a network authentication, use this username by default. See credential.<context>.* below, and gitcredentials(7) 🍓.
credential.<url>.* — literally any of the credential.* options above can be applied selectively to some credentials 👀. Like, "credential.https://example.com.username" would set the default username only for https connections to example.com. See gitcredentials(7) for how URLs get matched 💜.
credentialCache.ignoreSIGHUP — tells git-credential-cache--daemon to ignore SIGHUP instead of quitting 😭.
credentialStore.lockTimeoutMS — how long, in milliseconds, git-credential-store retries when trying to lock the credentials file. 0 means don't retry at all; -1 means try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (so, retry for 1s) ⭐.

diff.autoRefreshIndex — when you use git diff to compare against work tree files, don't count stat-only changes as changed, okay? Instead it silently runs git update-index --refresh to update the cached stat info for paths whose contents in the work tree match the contents in the index. Defaults to <green>true</green>. Important caveat bestie: this affects only git diff Porcelain, not lower level diff commands like git diff-files 🙈.
diff.dirstat — a comma separated list of --dirstat parameters setting the default behavior of the --dirstat option for git-diff(1) and friends ✨. You can override the defaults on the command line (with --dirstat=<param>,...). The fallback defaults (when diff.dirstat doesn't change anything) are changes,noncumulative,3. Here's what's available:
- changes — compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines removed from the source or added to the destination. This ignores how much pure code movement happened inside a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file doesn't count as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given 💅.
- lines — compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines 🫠). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than changes, but it does count rearranged lines inside a file as much as other changes. The output you get is consistent with the other --*stat options 🎀.
- files — compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior since it doesn't have to look at file contents at all 👑.
- cumulative — count changes in a child directory for the parent directory too. Note that with cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100% 😭. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
- <limit> — an integer parameter specifying a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes aren't shown in the output 🌈.

Example: the following will count changed files, ignore directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulate child directory counts in the parent directories: files,10,cumulative 🔥.

diff.statNameWidth — limits the width of the filename part in --stat output. If set, it applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch ✨.
diff.statGraphWidth — limits the width of the graph part in --stat output. If set, it applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch ✨.
diff.context — generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the default of 3. This value gets overridden by the -U option.
diff.interHunkContext — show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, which fuses hunks that are close to each other 🦋. This value serves as the default for the --inter-hunk-context command line option.
diff.external — if this config variable is set, diff generation isn't done with the internal diff machinery, it's done with the given command 💅. Can be overridden with the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable. The command gets called with parameters as described under "git Diffs" in git(1).

Note: if you only want an external diff program on a subset of your files, you might want to use gitattributes(5) instead 👀.

diff.trustExitCode — if this boolean is true, then the diff.external command is expected to return exit code 0 when it thinks the input files are equal, or 1 when it thinks they're different, just like diff(1). If it's false — which is the default — the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes git to report a fatal error 💀.
diff.ignoreSubmodules — sets the default value of --ignore-submodules 😌. Heads up: this affects only git diff Porcelain, not lower level diff commands like git diff-files. git checkout and git switch also honor this setting when reporting uncommitted changes. Setting it to all disables the submodule summary normally shown by git commit and git status when status.submoduleSummary is set — unless it's overridden with the --ignore-submodules command-line option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting. By default this is set to untracked so any untracked submodules get ignored 🎀.
diff.mnemonicPrefix — if set, git diff uses a prefix pair that's different from the standard a/ and b/ depending on what's being compared. When this config is in effect, reverse diff output also swaps the order of the prefixes 👑:
- git diff — compares the (i)ndex and the (w)ork tree;
- git diff HEAD — compares a (c)ommit and the (w)ork tree;
- git diff --cached — compares a (c)ommit and the (i)ndex;
- git diff HEAD:<file1> <file2> — compares an (o)bject and a (w)ork tree entity;
- git diff --no-index <a> <b> — compares two non-git things <a> and <b> 🦋.
diff.noPrefix — if set, git diff doesn't show any source or destination prefix 🚫.
diff.srcPrefix — if set, git diff uses this source prefix. Defaults to a/ 💖.
diff.dstPrefix — if set, git diff uses this destination prefix. Defaults to b/ 💖.

okay so the config file has strong feelings about how diffs are done, and honestly? valid. here's the whole diff.* lineup 💅

diff.relative — set this bad boy to true and git diff stops showing you changes from outside the directory you're standing in, plus it shows pathnames relative to the current directory. very "stay in your lane" of it ✨
diff.orderFile — points at a file that tells Git how to order the files inside a diff. see the -O option to git-diff(1) for the deets. if diff.orderFile is a relative pathname, it gets treated as relative to the top of the working tree, iykyk 🌸
diff.renameLimit — how many files to consider in the exhaustive portion of copy/rename detection; same energy as the git diff option -l. if you don't set it, the default value is currently 1000. this setting does nothing if rename detection is turned off, so don't come crying 😭
diff.renames — whether and how Git detects renames. set it to false and rename detection is fully disabled. set it to true and you get basic rename detection. set it to copies or copy and Git will detect copies too, periodt. defaults to true. heads up though: this only affects git diff Porcelain like git-diff(1) and git-log(1), not lower level commands such as git-diff-files(1) 🫶
diff.suppressBlankEmpty — a boolean that inhibits the standard behavior of printing a space before each empty output line. defaults to false.
diff.submodule — picks the format for showing differences in submodules. the short format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. the log format lists the commits in the range like git-submodule(1) summary does. the diff format shows an inline diff of the changed contents of the submodule. defaults to short 💖
diff.wordRegex — a POSIX Extended Regular Expression that decides what counts as a "word" when Git does word-by-word difference calculations. character sequences that match the regex are "words", and all other characters are ignorable whitespace. iconic honestly.
diff.<driver>.command — the custom diff driver command. see gitattributes(5) for details.
diff.<driver>.trustExitCode — if this boolean is true, then the diff.<driver>.command command is expected to return exit code 0 if it thinks the input files are equal, or 1 if it thinks they're different, like diff(1). if it's false (which is the default, bestie), then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error 💀
diff.<driver>.xfuncname — the regular expression the diff driver should use to recognize the hunk header. a built-in pattern may also be used. see gitattributes(5).
diff.<driver>.binary — set this option to true to make the diff driver treat files as binary. see gitattributes(5).
diff.<driver>.textconv — the command the diff driver should call to generate the text-converted version of a file. the result of the conversion is used to generate a human-readable diff. see gitattributes(5) 🦋
diff.<driver>.wordRegex — the regular expression the diff driver should use to split words in a line. see gitattributes(5).
diff.<driver>.cachetextconv — set this to true to make the diff driver cache the text conversion outputs. see gitattributes(5). caching? we love her 💅
diff.indentHeuristic — set this to false to disable the default heuristics that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.
diff.algorithm — picks a diff algorithm. the variants are:
- default, myers — the basic greedy diff algorithm. currently, this is the default.
- minimal — spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
- patience — use the "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
- histogram — this algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".
diff.wsErrorHighlight — highlights whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default resets the list to new, and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. the whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace. the command line option --ws-error-highlight=<kind> overrides this setting, no cap 🔥
diff.colorMoved — if you set it to either a valid <mode> or a true value, moved lines in a diff get colored differently. for the details of valid modes, see --color-moved in git-diff(1). if you just set it to true, the default color mode gets used. when it's false, moved lines are not colored.
diff.colorMovedWS — when moved lines are colored using, like, the diff.colorMoved setting, this option controls the mode for how spaces are treated. for the details of valid modes see --color-moved-ws in git-diff(1).
diff.tool — controls which diff tool git-difftool(1) uses. this variable overrides the value configured in merge.tool. the list below shows the valid built-in values, and any other value is treated as a custom diff tool, which requires that a corresponding difftool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined. slay.
diff.guitool — controls which diff tool git-difftool(1) uses when the -g/--gui flag is specified. this variable overrides the value configured in merge.guitool. the list below shows the valid built-in values, and any other value is treated as a custom diff tool, which requires that a corresponding difftool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined ✨

the built-in tool list (applies to both, bestie) 🎀

araxis — use Araxis Merge (requires a graphical session)
bc — use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc3 — use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc4 — use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
codecompare — use Code Compare (requires a graphical session)
deltawalker — use DeltaWalker (requires a graphical session)
diffmerge — use DiffMerge (requires a graphical session)
diffuse — use Diffuse (requires a graphical session)
ecmerge — use ECMerge (requires a graphical session)
emerge — use Emacs' Emerge
examdiff — use ExamDiff Pro (requires a graphical session)
guiffy — use Guiffy’s Diff Tool (requires a graphical session)
gvimdiff — use gVim (requires a graphical session)
kdiff3 — use KDiff3 (requires a graphical session)
kompare — use Kompare (requires a graphical session)
meld — use Meld (requires a graphical session)
nvimdiff — use Neovim
opendiff — use FileMerge (requires a graphical session)
p4merge — use HelixCore P4Merge (requires a graphical session)
smerge — use Sublime Merge (requires a graphical session)
tkdiff — use TkDiff (requires a graphical session)
vimdiff — use Vim
vscode — use Visual Studio Code (requires a graphical session)
winmerge — use WinMerge (requires a graphical session)
xxdiff — use xxdiff (requires a graphical session)
difftool.<tool>.cmd — specifies the command to invoke the specified diff tool. the specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: LOCAL is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff pre-image and REMOTE is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff post-image. see the --tool=<tool> option in git-difftool(1) for more details 🫶
difftool.<tool>.path — overrides the path for the given tool. this is useful in case your tool is not in the PATH, because of course it isn't 🙈
difftool.trustExitCode — exit difftool if the invoked diff tool returns a non-zero exit status. see the --trust-exit-code option in git-difftool(1) for more details.
difftool.prompt — prompt before each invocation of the diff tool.
difftool.guiDefault — set it to true to use the diff.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select diff.guitool or diff.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. the default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the diff.guitool to be used 💜

and now the extensions.* section, which is giving "advanced placement" energy ngl:

extensions.* — unless otherwise stated, it is an error to specify an extension if core.repositoryFormatVersion is not 1. see gitrepository-layout(5) ⭐
- compatObjectFormat — specify a compatibility hash algorithm to use. the acceptable values are sha1 and sha256. the value specified must be different from the value of extensions.objectFormat. this allows client level interoperability between git repositories whose objectFormat matches this compatObjectFormat. in particular when fully implemented the pushes and pulls from a repository in whose objectFormat matches compatObjectFormat. as well as being able to use oids encoded in compatObjectFormat in addition to oids encoded with objectFormat to locally specify objects.

note that the functionality enabled by this extension is incomplete and subject to change. it currently exists only to allow development and testing of the underlying feature and is not designed to be enabled by end users. so like… don't, bestie 😭

noop — this extension does not change git’s behavior at all. it is useful only for testing format-1 compatibility. for historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.
noop-v1 — this extension does not change git’s behavior at all. it is useful only for testing format-1 compatibility.
objectFormat — specify the hash algorithm to use. the acceptable values are sha1 and sha256. if not specified, sha1 is assumed.

note that this setting should only be set by git-init(1) or git-clone(1). trying to change it after initialization will not work and will produce hard-to-diagnose issues. for real, do not touch 💀

partialClone — when enabled, indicates that the repo was created with a partial clone (or later performed a partial fetch) and that the remote may have omitted sending certain unwanted objects. such a remote is called a "promisor remote" and it promises that all such omitted objects can be fetched from it in the future. the value of this key is the name of the promisor remote 🌈

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting. (Yes, again. This family of extensions lowkey does not care about your format version era. 💅)

preciousObjects — turn this on and it means the objects in the repo MUST NOT be deleted (like, by git-prune or git repack -d). Precious. Literally in the name, bestie. Same deal as the others: for historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.
refStorage — tells Git what ref storage format to use and a matching payload. The value is either a format name or a URI:
- A format name on its own (e.g. reftable or files).
- A URI in the form <format>://<payload> — which explicitly says both the format and the payload (e.g. reftable:///foo/bar).

The supported format names are:

files — for loose files with packed-refs. This one is the default. 🎀
reftable — for the reftable format.

The payload gets passed straight through to the reference backend. For the files and reftable backends, this has to be a filesystem path where the references will be stored — and it defaults to the commondir when no payload is given. Relative paths get resolved relative to the $GIT_DIR. Future backends might support other payload schemes, e.g. postgres://127.0.0.1:5432?database=myrepo.

⚠️ Heads up: this setting should only be set by git-init(1) or git-clone(1). Trying to change it after initialization will not work and will produce hard-to-diagnose issues. Like, please don't. 😭

relativeWorktrees — if enabled, it means at least one worktree has been linked with relative paths. It gets set automatically if a worktree has been created or repaired with either the --relative-paths option or with the worktree.useRelativePaths config set to true. 🦋
submodulePathConfig — this extension exists for the minority of users who:
- Hit errors like refusing to create ... in another submodule's git dir, for a whole bunch of reasons — like case-insensitive filesystem conflicts when you create modules named foo and Foo. 💀
- Need more flexible submodule layouts, for example because nested names like foo, foo/bar and foo/baz are not supported by the default gitdir mechanism (which uses .git/modules/<plain-name> locations), and that causes even more conflicts.

When extensions.submodulePathConfig is enabled, the submodule.<name>.gitdir config becomes the single source of truth for all submodule gitdir paths, and it's automatically set for all new submodules during both clone and init operations.

Git will error out if a module does not have a corresponding submodule.<name>.gitdir set. no cap.

Existing (pre-extension) submodules need to be migrated by adding the missing config entries. You can do this manually, e.g. for each submodule: git config submodule.<name>.gitdir .git/modules/<name>, or via the git submodule--helper migrate-gitdir-configs command, which iterates over all submodules and attempts to migrate them.

You can have the extension enabled automatically for new repositories by setting init.defaultSubmodulePathConfig to true — for example, by running git config --global init.defaultSubmodulePathConfig true. ✨

worktreeConfig — if enabled, then worktrees will load config settings from the $GIT_DIR/config.worktree file in addition to the $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config file. Note that $GIT_COMMON_DIR and $GIT_DIR are the same for the main working tree, while other working trees have $GIT_DIR equal to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees/<id>/. The settings in the config.worktree file will override settings from any other config files. 👑

When you enable this extension, you must be careful to move certain values from the common config file to the main working tree's config.worktree file, if present:

core.worktree must be moved from $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config.worktree.
If core.bare is true, then it must be moved from $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config.worktree.

It may also be beneficial to adjust the locations of core.sparseCheckout and core.sparseCheckoutCone depending on how much you want customizable sparse-checkout settings for each worktree. By default, the git sparse-checkout builtin enables this extension, assigns these config values on a per-worktree basis, and uses the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file to specify the sparsity for each worktree independently. See git-sparse-checkout(1) for more details. 🌸

And yeah — for historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

🌈 `fastimport.unpackLimit`

If the number of objects imported by git-fast-import(1) is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. But if the number of imported objects equals or exceeds this limit, then the pack will be stored as a pack. Storing the pack from a fast-import can make the import operation complete faster — especially on slow filesystems. If it's not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

✨ `feature.*`

The config settings that start with feature. modify the defaults of a group of other config settings. These groups are created by the Git developer community as recommended defaults and are subject to change. In particular, new config options may be added with different defaults. It's giving "curated vibes, moving target." 💅

🧪 `feature.experimental`

Enable config options that are new to Git and are being considered for future defaults. Config settings included here may be added or removed with each release — including minor version updates. These settings may have unintended interactions since they're so new. Please enable this setting if you're interested in providing feedback on experimental features. The new default values are:

fetch.negotiationAlgorithm=skipping may improve fetch negotiation times by skipping more commits at a time, reducing the number of round trips.
pack.useBitmapBoundaryTraversal=true may improve bitmap traversal times by walking fewer objects.
pack.allowPackReuse=multi may improve the time it takes to create a pack by reusing objects from multiple packs instead of just one.
pack.usePathWalk may speed up packfile creation and make the packfiles significantly smaller in the presence of certain filename collisions with Git's default name-hash.
init.defaultRefFormat=reftable causes newly initialized repositories to use the reftable format for storing references. This new format solves issues with case-insensitive filesystems, compresses better, and performs significantly better with many use cases. Refer to Documentation/technical/reftable.adoc for more information on this new storage format. 🔥

🗂️ `feature.manyFiles`

Enable config options that optimize for repos with many files in the working directory. With many files, commands like git status and git checkout may be slow, and these new defaults improve performance:

index.skipHash=true speeds up index writes by not computing a trailing checksum. Note that this will cause Git versions earlier than 2.13.0 to refuse to parse the index, and Git versions earlier than 2.40.0 will report a corrupted index during git fsck. 💀 so like, know your audience.
index.version=4 enables path-prefix compression in the index.
core.untrackedCache=true enables the untracked cache. This setting assumes that mtime is working on your machine. 🫶

🌀 `fetch.recurseSubmodules`

This option controls whether git fetch (and the underlying fetch in git pull) will recursively fetch into populated submodules. It can be set either to a boolean value or to on-demand. Setting it to a boolean changes the behavior of fetch and pull to recurse unconditionally into submodules when set to true, or to not recurse at all when set to false. When set to on-demand, fetch and pull will only recurse into a populated submodule when its superproject retrieves a commit that updates the submodule's reference. Defaults to on-demand, or to the value of submodule.recurse if set.

🔍 `fetch.fsckObjects`

If it's set to true, git-fetch-pack will check all fetched objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what's checked. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.

🩺 `fetch.fsck.<msg-id>`

Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by git-fetch-pack(1) instead of git-fsck(1). See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.

📋 `fetch.fsck.skipList`

Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by git-fetch-pack(1) instead of git-fsck(1). See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.

📦 `fetch.unpackLimit`

If the number of objects fetched over the Git native transfer is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However, if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit, then the received pack will be stored as a pack — after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

🧹 `fetch.prune`

If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the --prune option was given on the command line. See also remote.<name>.prune and the PRUNING section of git-fetch(1).

🏷️ `fetch.pruneTags`

If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* refspec was provided when pruning — if it's not set already. This lets you set both this option and fetch.prune to maintain a 1=1 mapping to upstream refs. See also remote.<name>.pruneTags and the PRUNING section of git-fetch(1). 🎀

🌍 `fetch.all`

If true, fetch will attempt to update all available remotes. This behavior can be overridden by passing --no-all or by explicitly specifying one or more remote(s) to fetch from. Defaults to false.

🖨️ `fetch.output`

Controls how ref update status is printed. Valid values are full and compact. Default value is full. See the OUTPUT section in git-fetch(1) for details. ✨

`fetch.negotiationAlgorithm`

Okay so this one controls how info about the commits in ur local repo gets sent over when Git is negotiating what goes in the packfile that the server's gonna send u 🫶. Set it to consecutive to use an algorithm that walks over consecutive commits and checks each one. Set it to skipping to use one that skips commits so it converges faster — but heads up, that may give u a larger-than-necessary packfile 😭. Or set it to noop to not send any information at all, which will almost certainly result in a larger-than-necessary packfile, but it does skip the negotiation step entirely. Set it to default to override settings u made previously and just use the default behaviour. The default is normally consecutive, but if feature.experimental is true then the default is skipping. Unknown values will cause git fetch to error out, no cap 💀.

See also the --negotiate-only and --negotiation-restrict options to git-fetch(1).

`fetch.showForcedUpdates`

Set to false to enable --no-show-forced-updates in git-fetch(1) and git-pull(1) commands. Defaults to true. Simple as that ✨

`fetch.parallel`

Specifies the maximal number of fetch operations to be run in parallel at a time (that's submodules, or remotes when the --multiple option of git-fetch(1) is in effect) 🔥

A value of 0 will give u some reasonable default. If unset, it defaults to 1.

For submodules, this setting can be overridden using the submodule.fetchJobs config setting.

`fetch.writeCommitGraph`

Set to true to write a commit-graph after every git fetch command that downloads a pack-file from a remote. Using the --split option, most executions will create a very small commit-graph file on top of the existing commit-graph file(s). Occasionally these files will merge and the write may take longer. Having an updated commit-graph file helps performance of many Git commands, including git merge-base, git push -f, and git log --graph. Defaults to false. It's giving "small effort, big glow-up" 💅

`fetch.bundleURI`

This value stores a URI for downloading Git object data from a bundle URI before performing an incremental fetch from the origin Git server. This is similar to how the --bundle-uri option behaves in git-clone(1). git clone --bundle-uri will set the fetch.bundleURI value if the supplied bundle URI contains a bundle list that's organized for incremental fetches 🎀

If u modify this value and ur repository has a fetch.bundleCreationToken value, then remove that fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching from the new bundle URI. Don't skip that step bestie 🙈

`fetch.bundleCreationToken`

When using fetch.bundleURI to fetch incrementally from a bundle list that uses the "creationToken" heuristic, this config value stores the maximum creationToken value of the downloaded bundles. This value is used to prevent downloading bundles in the future if the advertised creationToken is not strictly larger than this value 👑

The creation token values are chosen by the provider serving the specific bundle URI. If u modify the URI at fetch.bundleURI, then be sure to remove the value for the fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching.

`fetch.followRemoteHEAD`

When fetching using a default refspec, this setting determines how to handle differences between a fetched remote's HEAD and the local remotes/<name>/HEAD symbolic-ref. Its value is one of:

create — create remotes/<name>/HEAD if a ref exists on the remote, but not locally. An existing symbolic-ref will not be touched. This is the default value.
warn — display a warning if the remote advertises a different HEAD than what's set locally. Behaves like "create" if the local symbolic-ref doesn't exist.
always — silently update remotes/<name>/HEAD whenever the remote advertises a new value.
never — never create or modify the remotes/<name>/HEAD symbolic-ref.

`filter.<driver>.clean`

The command which is used to convert the content of a worktree file to a blob upon checkin. See gitattributes(5) for details 🦋

`filter.<driver>.smudge`

The command which is used to convert the content of a blob object to a worktree file upon checkout. See gitattributes(5) for details 🦋

`format.attach`

Enable multipart/mixed attachments as the default for format-patch. The value can also be a double quoted string, which will enable attachments as the default and set the value as the boundary. See the --attach option in git-format-patch(1). To countermand an earlier value, set it to an empty string 🌸

`format.from`

Provides the default value for the --from option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a name and email address. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-from, using commit authors directly in the "From:" field of patch mails. If true, format-patch defaults to --from, using ur committer identity in the "From:" field of patch mails and including a "From:" field in the body of the patch mail if different. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch uses that value instead of ur committer identity. Defaults to false.

`format.forceInBodyFrom`

Provides the default value for the --[no-]force-in-body-from option to format-patch. Defaults to false.

`format.numbered`

A boolean which can enable or disable sequence numbers in patch subjects. It defaults to "auto", which enables it only if there's more than one patch. It can be enabled or disabled for all messages by setting it to "true" or "false". See the --numbered option in git-format-patch(1).

`format.headers`

Additional email headers to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See git-format-patch(1) ✨

`format.to`, `format.cc`

Additional recipients to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See the --to and --cc options in git-format-patch(1).

`format.subjectPrefix`

The default for format-patch is to output files with the [PATCH] subject prefix. Use this variable to change that prefix 💌

`format.coverFromDescription`

The default mode for format-patch to determine which parts of the cover letter will be populated using the branch's description. See the --cover-from-description option in git-format-patch(1).

`format.signature`

The default for format-patch is to output a signature containing the Git version number. Use this variable to change that default. Set this variable to the empty string ("") to suppress signature generation 🙅‍♀️

`format.signatureFile`

Works just like format.signature except the contents of the file specified by this variable will be used as the signature.

`format.suffix`

The default for format-patch is to output files with the suffix .patch. Use this variable to change that suffix (make sure to include the dot if u want it, bestie 🎀).

`format.encodeEmailHeaders`

Encode email headers that have non-ASCII characters with "Q-encoding" (described in RFC 2047) for email transmission. Defaults to true.

`format.pretty`

The default pretty format for log/show/whatchanged command. See git-log(1), git-show(1), git-whatchanged(1).

`format.thread`

The default threading style for git format-patch. Can be a boolean value, or shallow or deep. shallow threading makes every mail a reply to the head of the series, where the head is chosen from the cover letter, the --in-reply-to, and the first patch mail, in this order. deep threading makes every mail a reply to the previous one. A true boolean value is the same as shallow, and a false value disables threading 🧵

`format.signOff`

A boolean value which lets u enable the -s/--signoff option of format-patch by default.

Note: adding the Signed-off-by trailer to a patch should be a conscious act and means that u certify u have the rights to submit this work under the same open source license. Please see the SubmittingPatches document for further discussion. Like, actually read it, it's a whole legal vibe check ⚖️

`format.coverLetter`

A boolean that controls whether to generate a cover-letter when format-patch is invoked, but in addition can be set to "auto", to generate a cover-letter only when there's more than one patch. Default is false.

`format.commitListFormat`

When the --commit-list-format option is not given, format-patch uses the value of this variable to decide how to format the entry of each commit. Defaults to shortlog.

`format.outputDirectory`

Set a custom directory to store the resulting files instead of the current working directory. All directory components will be created 📁

`format.filenameMaxLength`

The maximum length of the output filenames generated by the format-patch command; defaults to 64. Can be overridden by the --filename-max-length=<n> command line option.

`format.useAutoBase`

A boolean value which lets u enable the --base=auto option of format-patch by default. Can also be set to "whenAble" to allow enabling --base=auto if a suitable base is available, but to skip adding base info otherwise without the format dying 💀

`format.notes`

Provides the default value for the --notes option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a ref which specifies where to get notes. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-notes. If true, format-patch defaults to --notes. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch defaults to --notes=<ref>, where ref is the non-boolean value. Defaults to false.

If u wish to use the ref refs/notes/true, please use that literal instead 👀

This configuration can be specified multiple times in order to allow multiple notes refs to be included. In that case, it will behave similarly to multiple --[no-]notes[=] options passed in. That is, a value of true will show the default notes, a value of <ref> will also show notes from that notes ref, and a value of false will negate previous configurations and not show notes.

For example,

[format]
    notes = true
    notes = foo
    notes = false
    notes = bar

will only show notes from refs/notes/bar. Order matters, icon behaviour 🫶

`format.mboxrd`

A boolean value which enables the robust "mboxrd" format when --stdout is in use to escape "^>+From " lines. Escaping queen 👑

format.noprefix — okay so if this is set, you won’t see any source or destination prefix in patches. It’s equivalent to the diff.noprefix option used by git diff (but which is not respected by format-patch). Heads up, bestie: by setting this, the receiver of any patches you generate will have to apply them using the -p0 option. 💅
fsck.<msg-id> — so during fsck, Git may find issues with legacy data that wouldn’t be generated by current versions of Git, and that wouldn’t be sent over the wire if transfer.fsckObjects was set. This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories containing such data. ✨ Setting fsck.<msg-id> will be picked up by git-fsck(1), but to accept pushes of such data set receive.fsck.<msg-id> instead, or to clone or fetch it set fetch.fsck.<msg-id>. The rest of the documentation discusses fsck.* for brevity, but the same applies for the corresponding receive.fsck.* and fetch.fsck.* variables. Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor, the receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> variables will not fall back on the fsck.<msg-id> configuration if they aren’t set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values. No cap. When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with the message ID, e.g. missingEmail: invalid author/committer line - missing email means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue. In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with problems with fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of breakages these problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing the latter will allow new instances of the same breakages go unnoticed. Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> will only cause git to warn. See the Fsck Messages section of git-fsck(1) for supported values of <msg-id>. 🌈
fsck.skipList — the path to a list of object names (i.e. one unabbreviated SHA-1 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later, comments (#), empty lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace are ignored. Everything but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions. This feature is useful when an established project should be accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely ignored, such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt objects cannot be skipped with this setting. Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants. Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren’t set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values. Okay, lore time: older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object names list should be sorted. This was never a requirement; the object names could appear in any order, but when reading the list we tracked whether the list was sorted for the purposes of an internal binary search implementation, which could save itself some work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list. After Git version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so there’s now no reason to pre-sort the list. Slay, efficiency.
fsmonitor.allowRemote — by default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with network-mounted repositories. Setting fsmonitor.allowRemote to true overrides this behavior. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true. 💙
fsmonitor.socketDir — this Mac OS and Linux-specific option, if set, specifies the directory in which to create the Unix domain socket used for communication between the fsmonitor daemon and various Git commands. The directory must reside on a native filesystem. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true. ✨
gc.aggressiveDepth — the depth parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 50, which is the default for the --depth option when --aggressive isn’t in use. See the documentation for the --depth option in git-repack(1) for more details. 🌱
gc.aggressiveWindow — the window size parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 250, which is a much more aggressive window size than the default --window of 10. See the documentation for the --window option in git-repack(1) for more details. 🔥
gc.auto — when there are approximately more than this many loose objects in the repository, git gc --auto will pack them. Some Porcelain commands use this command to perform a light-weight garbage collection from time to time. The default value is 6700. Setting this to 0 disables not only automatic packing based on the number of loose objects, but also any other heuristic git gc --auto will otherwise use to determine if there’s work to do, such as gc.autoPackLimit. 💖
gc.autoPackLimit — when there are more than this many packs that are not marked with *.keep file in the repository, git gc --auto consolidates them into one larger pack. The default value is 50. Setting this to 0 disables it. Setting gc.auto to 0 will also disable this. See the gc.bigPackThreshold configuration variable below. When in use, it’ll affect how the auto pack limit works. 👀
gc.autoDetach — make git gc --auto return immediately and run in the background if the system supports it. Default is true. This config variable acts as a fallback in case maintenance.autoDetach is not set. ✨
gc.bigPackThreshold — if non-zero, all non-cruft packs larger than this limit are kept when git gc is run. This is very similar to --keep-largest-pack except that all non-cruft packs that meet the threshold are kept, not just the largest pack. Defaults to zero. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported. Note that if the number of kept packs is more than gc.autoPackLimit, this configuration variable is ignored, all packs except the base pack will be repacked. After this the number of packs should go below gc.autoPackLimit and gc.bigPackThreshold should be respected again. If the amount of memory estimated for git repack to run smoothly is not available and gc.bigPackThreshold is not set, the largest pack will also be excluded (this is the equivalent of running git gc with --keep-largest-pack). Big pack energy.
gc.writeCommitGraph — if true, then gc will rewrite the commit-graph file when git-gc(1) is run. When using git gc --auto the commit-graph will be updated if housekeeping is required. Default is true. See git-commit-graph(1) for details. 🫶
gc.logExpiry — if the file gc.log exists, then git gc --auto will print its content and exit with status zero instead of running unless that file is more than gc.logExpiry old. Default is "1.day". See gc.pruneExpire for more ways to specify its value. 🍓
gc.packRefs — running git pack-refs in a repository renders it unclonable by Git versions prior to 1.5.1.2 over dumb transports such as HTTP. This variable determines whether git gc runs git pack-refs. This can be set to notbare to enable it within all non-bare repos or it can be set to a boolean value. The default is true. 💜
gc.cruftPacks — store unreachable objects in a cruft pack (see git-repack(1)) instead of as loose objects. The default is true. 🧚
gc.maxCruftSize — limit the size of new cruft packs when repacking. When specified in addition to --max-cruft-size, the command line option takes priority. See the --max-cruft-size option of git-repack(1). ✨
gc.pruneExpire — when git gc is run, it will call prune --expire 2.weeks.ago (and repack --cruft --cruft-expiration 2.weeks.ago if using cruft packs via gc.cruftPacks or --cruft). Override the grace period with this config variable. The value "now" may be used to disable this grace period and always prune unreachable objects immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning. This feature helps prevent corruption when git gc runs concurrently with another process writing to the repository; see the NOTES section of git-gc(1). Important tea ☕
gc.worktreePruneExpire — when git gc is run, it calls git worktree prune --expire 3.months.ago. This config variable can be used to set a different grace period. The value "now" may be used to disable the grace period and prune $GIT_DIR/worktrees immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning. 💛
gc.reflogExpire, gc.<pattern>.reflogExpire — git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time; defaults to 90 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With <pattern> (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>. 💅
gc.reflogExpireUnreachable, gc.<pattern>.reflogExpireUnreachable — git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time and are not reachable from the current tip; defaults to 30 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With <pattern> (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>. These types of entries are generally created as a result of using git commit --amend or git rebase and are the commits prior to the amend or rebase occurring. Since these changes are not part of the current project most users will want to expire them sooner, which is why the default is more aggressive than gc.reflogExpire. Reflog cleanup era ✨

🧚 `gc.recentObjectsHook`

Okay so when Git is deciding whether to yeet an object (either while cooking up a cruft pack or while stashing unreachable objects as loose ones), it can run your specified command(s) through the shell first. Interpret whatever they print as object IDs that Git treats as "recent", no matter how ancient they actually are. By pretending their mtimes are "now", any objects (and their descendants) mentioned in the output get kept, regardless of their true age. 🫶

Output must be exactly one hex object ID per line, and nothing else. Objects that can't be found in the repository are just ignored. Multiple hooks are supported, but all of them must exit successfully — otherwise the whole operation (generating a cruft pack or unpacking unreachable objects) gets halted. 💀

🎀 `gc.repackFilter`

When repacking, use the specified filter to move certain objects into a separate packfile. See the --filter=<filter-spec> option of git-repack(1).

🌸 `gc.repackFilterTo`

When repacking and using a filter (see gc.repackFilter), the specified location is where the packfile containing the filtered-out objects gets created.

⚠️ WARNING: that specified location should be accessible — using the Git alternates mechanism, for example — otherwise the repo could be considered corrupt by Git, since it might not be able to access the objects in that packfile. See the --filter-to=<dir> option of git-repack(1) and the objects/info/alternates section of gitrepository-layout(5).

🦋 `gc.rerereResolved`

Records of conflicted merges you resolved earlier are kept for this many days when git rerere gc runs. You can also use more human-readable stuff like "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 60 days. See git-rerere(1). ✨

💅 `gc.rerereUnresolved`

Records of conflicted merges you have not resolved are kept for this many days when git rerere gc runs. You can also use more human-readable stuff like "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 15 days. See git-rerere(1).

🌈 `gitcvs.commitMsgAnnotation`

Append this string to each commit message. Set it to the empty string to disable the feature entirely. Defaults to "via git-CVS emulator".

⭐ `gitcvs.enabled`

Whether the CVS server interface is enabled for this repository. See git-cvsserver(1).

🍓 `gitcvs.logFile`

Path to a log file where the CVS server interface well... logs various stuff. See git-cvsserver(1). 😭

💜 `gitcvs.usecrlfattr`

If true, the server looks up the end-of-line conversion attributes for files to figure out which -k modes to use. If the attributes force Git to treat a file as text, the -k mode gets left blank so CVS clients treat it as text. If they suppress text conversion, the file gets set with -kb mode, which suppresses any newline munging the client might otherwise do. If the attributes don't allow the file type to be determined, then gitcvs.allBinary is used. See gitattributes(5).

🔥 `gitcvs.allBinary`

This kicks in if gitcvs.usecrlfattr doesn't resolve the correct -kb mode to use. If true, all unresolved files get sent to the client in mode -kb — which makes the client treat them as binary files, suppressing any newline munging it otherwise might do. Alternatively, if it's set to "guess", then the contents of the file are examined to decide if it's binary, similar to core.autocrlf.

🎀 `gitcvs.dbName`

The database used by git-cvsserver to cache revision information derived from the Git repository. The exact meaning depends on the database driver in use — for SQLite (which is the default driver) this is a filename. Supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver(1) for details). May not contain semicolons (;). Default: %Ggitcvs.%m.sqlite

🧚 `gitcvs.dbDriver`

The Perl DBI driver used. You can specify any available driver here, but it might not work. git-cvsserver is tested with DBD::SQLite, reported to work with DBD::Pg, and reported not to work with DBD::mysql. Experimental feature. May not contain double colons (:). Default: SQLite. See git-cvsserver(1).

🫶 `gitcvs.dbUser`, `gitcvs.dbPass`

Database user and password. Only useful if you're setting gitcvs.dbDriver, since SQLite has no concept of database users and/or passwords. gitcvs.dbUser supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver(1) for details).

🌸 `gitcvs.dbTableNamePrefix`

Database table name prefix. Prepend it to the names of any database tables used, which lets a single database serve several repositories. Supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver(1) for details). Any non-alphabetic characters get replaced with underscores.

Okay bestie, important footnote moment: All gitcvs variables except for gitcvs.usecrlfattr and gitcvs.allBinary can also be specified as gitcvs.<access_method>.<varname> (where access_method is one of "ext" and "pserver") to make them apply only for that given access method. 💅

👑 `gitweb.category`, `gitweb.description`, `gitweb.owner`, `gitweb.url`

See gitweb(1) for description.

🌈 `gitweb.avatar`, `gitweb.blame`, `gitweb.grep`, `gitweb.highlight`, `gitweb.patches`, `gitweb.pickaxe`, `gitweb.remote_heads`, `gitweb.showSizes`, `gitweb.snapshot`

See gitweb.conf(5) for description.

🔐 `gpg.program`

Pathname of the program to use instead of "gpg" when making or verifying a PGP signature. The program must support the same command-line interface as GPG, namely: to verify a detached signature, gpg --verify $signature - <$file is run, and the program is expected to signal a good signature by exiting with code 0. To generate an ASCII-armored detached signature, the standard input of gpg -bsau $key is fed with the contents to be signed, and the program is expected to send the result to its standard output. ✨

🦋 `gpg.format`

Specifies which key format to use when signing with --gpg-sign. Default is "openpgp". Other possible values are "x509", "ssh".

See gitformat-signature(5) for the signature format, which differs based on the selected gpg.format.

💜 `gpg.<format>.program`

Use this to customize the program used for the signing format you chose (see gpg.program and gpg.format). gpg.program can still be used as a legacy synonym for gpg.openpgp.program. The default value for gpg.x509.program is "gpgsm" and for gpg.ssh.program is "ssh-keygen".

⭐ `gpg.minTrustLevel`

Specifies a minimum trust level for signature verification. If this option is unset, then signature verification for merge operations requires a key with at least marginal trust. Other operations that perform signature verification require a key with at least undefined trust. Setting this option overrides the required trust-level for all operations. Supported values, in increasing order of significance:

undefined
never
marginal
fully
ultimate

🎀 `gpg.ssh.defaultKeyCommand`

This command gets run when user.signingkey is not set and an ssh signature is requested. On successful exit, a valid ssh public key prefixed with key:: is expected in the first line of its output. This allows for a script doing a dynamic lookup of the correct public key when it's impractical to statically configure user.signingKey — for example when keys or SSH Certificates are rotated frequently, or when picking the right key depends on external factors unknown to git. 😭

💅 `gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile`

A file containing ssh public keys you're willing to trust. It consists of one or more lines of principals followed by an ssh public key, e.g.:

user1@example.com,user2@example.com ssh-rsa AAAAX1...

See ssh-keygen(1) "ALLOWED SIGNERS" for details. The principal is only used to identify the key and is available when verifying a signature.

SSH has no concept of trust levels like gpg does. To be able to differentiate between valid signatures and trusted signatures, the trust level of a signature verification is set to fully when the public key is present in the allowedSignersFile. Otherwise the trust level is undefined and git verify-commit/tag will fail. 💀

This file can be set to a location outside of the repository, and every developer maintains their own trust store. A central repository server could generate this file automatically from ssh keys with push access, to verify the code against. In a corporate setting this file is probably generated at a global location from automation that already handles developer ssh keys.

A repository that only allows signed commits can store the file in the repository itself using a path relative to the top-level of the working tree. This way only committers with an already valid key can add or change keys in the keyring. 🗝️

Since OpensSSH 8.8 this file allows specifying a key lifetime using valid-after & valid-before options. Git will mark signatures as valid if the signing key was valid at the time of the signature's creation. This allows users to change a signing key without invalidating all previously made signatures.

Using a SSH CA key with the cert-authority option (see ssh-keygen(1) "CERTIFICATES") is also valid. 🧚

🌸 `gpg.ssh.revocationFile`

Either a SSH KRL or a list of revoked public keys (without the principal prefix). See ssh-keygen(1) for details. If a public key is found in this file then it will always be treated as having trust level "never" and signatures will show as invalid. 🚫

🔍 `grep.lineNumber`

If set to true, enable -n option by default.

🌈 `grep.column`

If set to true, enable the --column option by default.

⭐ `grep.patternType`

Sets the default matching behavior. Using a value of basic, extended, fixed, or perl will enable the --basic-regexp, --extended-regexp, --fixed-strings, or --perl-regexp option accordingly, while the value default will use the grep.extendedRegexp option to choose between basic and extended.

🎀 `grep.extendedRegexp`

If set to true, enable the --extended-regexp option by default. This option is ignored when the grep.patternType option is set to a value other than default.

🦋 `grep.threads`

Number of grep worker threads to use. If unset (or set to 0), Git will use as many threads as the number of logical cores available. 💅

💜 `grep.fullName`

If set to true, enable the --full-name option by default.

🍓 `grep.fallbackToNoIndex`

If set to true, fall back to git grep --no-index if git grep is executed outside of a git repository. Defaults to false.

gui.commitMsgWidth — sets how wide that commit message window is in git-gui(1). The default is "75". slay, standard width 💅
gui.diffContext — tells git-gui(1) how many context lines to use when it calls diff. Default is "5". no cap, five lines of context around the goods 🎀
gui.displayUntracked — decides whether git-gui(1) shows untracked files in the file list. Default is "true". yes bestie we do want to see the chaos 🌸
gui.encoding — the default character encoding for displaying file contents in git-gui(1) and gitk(1). It can be overridden by setting the encoding attribute for relevant files (see gitattributes(5)). If this option is not set, the tools default to the locale encoding. iykyk ✨
gui.matchTrackingBranch — determines if new branches made with git-gui(1) should default to tracking remote branches with matching names or not. Default: "false". lowkey conservative and that's valid 🦋
gui.newBranchTemplate — used as a suggested name when you create new branches using git-gui(1). it's giving "helpful little prefill" 💖
gui.pruneDuringFetch — "true" if git-gui(1) should prune remote-tracking branches when performing a fetch. The default value is "false". 🧹
gui.trustmtime — determines if git-gui(1) should trust the file modification timestamp or not. By default the timestamps are not trusted. trust issues, honestly valid 🙈
gui.spellingDictionary — the dictionary used for spell checking commit messages in git-gui(1). When set to "none" spell checking is turned off. goodbye spellcheck era 😭
gui.fastCopyBlame — if true, git gui blame uses -C instead of -C -C for original location detection. It makes blame significantly faster on huge repositories at the expense of less thorough copy detection. speed vs thoroughness, the eternal vibe check 🔥
gui.copyBlameThreshold — the threshold to use in git gui blame original location detection, measured in alphanumeric characters. See the git-blame(1) manual for more information on copy detection. 📏
gui.blamehistoryctx — the radius of history context in days to show in gitk(1) for the selected commit, when the Show History Context menu item is invoked from git gui blame. If this variable is set to zero, the whole history is shown. zero = full lore dump 👑
gui.GCWarning — determines whether git-gui(1) should prompt for garbage collection when git detects a large number of loose objects in the repository. The default value is "true". it's giving "hey bestie, time to tidy" ⭐
guitool.<name>.cmd — the shell command line to execute when the corresponding item of the git-gui(1) Tools menu is invoked. This option is mandatory for every tool. The command is executed from the root of the working directory, and in the environment it receives the name of the tool as GIT_GUITOOL, the name of the currently selected file as FILENAME, and the name of the current branch as CUR_BRANCH (if the head is detached, CUR_BRANCH is empty). the way it just hands you the whole context 🫶
guitool.<name>.needsFile — run the tool only if a diff is selected in the GUI. It guarantees that FILENAME is not empty. no diff, no run, periodt 💅
guitool.<name>.noConsole — run the command silently, without creating a window to display its output. stealth mode activated 🧚
guitool.<name>.noRescan — don't rescan the working directory for changes after the tool finishes execution. moving on immediately, iconic 🌈
guitool.<name>.confirm — show a confirmation dialog before actually running the tool. are you sure bestie 🎀
guitool.<name>.argPrompt — request a string argument from the user, and pass it to the tool through the ARGS environment variable. Since requesting an argument implies confirmation, the confirm option has no effect if this is enabled. If the option is set to true, yes, or 1, the dialog uses a built-in generic prompt; otherwise the exact value of the variable is used. 💖
guitool.<name>.revPrompt — request a single valid revision from the user, and set the REVISION environment variable. In other aspects this option is similar to argPrompt, and can be used together with it. duo combo, love that for you ✨
guitool.<name>.revUnmerged — show only unmerged branches in the revPrompt subdialog. This is useful for tools similar to merge or rebase, but not for things like checkout or reset. know the difference bestie 🔍
guitool.<name>.title — the title to use for the prompt dialog. The default is the tool name. 🌸
guitool.<name>.prompt — the general prompt string to display at the top of the dialog, before subsections for argPrompt and revPrompt. The default value includes the actual command. showing your work, we stan 👑
help.browser — specify the browser that will be used to display help in the web format. See git-help(1). 🦋
help.format — override the default help format used by git-help(1). Values man, info, web and html are supported. man is the default. web and html are the same. pick your fighter 💅
help.autoCorrect — if git detects typos and can identify exactly one valid command similar to the error, git will try to suggest the correct command or even run the suggestion automatically. Possible config values are:
- 0, "false", "off", "no", "show": show the suggested command (default). 👀
- 1, "true", "on", "yes", "immediate": run the suggested command immediately. 🔥
- positive number > 1: run the suggested command after specified deciseconds (0.1 sec). ⏱️
- "never": don't run or show any suggested command. 💀
- "prompt": show the suggestion and prompt for confirmation to run the command. 🙈
help.htmlPath — specify the path where the HTML documentation resides. File system paths and URLs are supported. HTML pages will be prefixed with this path when help is displayed in the web format. This defaults to the documentation path of your Git installation. 🎀
hook.<friendly-name>.command — the command to execute for hook.<friendly-name>. <friendly-name> is a unique name that identifies this hook. The hook events that trigger the command are configured with hook.<friendly-name>.event. The value can be an executable path or a shell oneliner. If more than one value is specified for the same <friendly-name>, only the last value parsed is used. See git-hook(1). last one wins, no cap 😭
hook.<friendly-name>.event — the hook events that trigger hook.<friendly-name>. The value is the name of a hook event, like "pre-commit" or "update". (See githooks(5) for a complete list of hook events.) On the specified event, the associated hook.<friendly-name>.command is executed. This is a multi-valued key. To run hook.<friendly-name> on multiple events, specify the key more than once. An empty value resets the list of events, clearing any previously defined events for hook.<friendly-name>. See git-hook(1).

The <friendly-name> must not be the same as a known hook event name (e.g. do not use hook.pre-commit.event). Using a known event name as a friendly-name is a fatal error because it creates an ambiguity with hook.<event>.enabled and hook.<event>.jobs. For unknown event names, a warning is issued when <friendly-name> matches the event value. ⚠️

hook.<friendly-name>.enabled — whether the hook hook.<friendly-name> is enabled. Defaults to true. Set to false to disable the hook without removing its configuration. This is particularly useful when a hook is defined in a system or global config file and needs to be disabled for a specific repository. See git-hook(1). off switch without the delete, we love an undo 🫶
hook.<friendly-name>.parallel — whether the hook hook.<friendly-name> may run in parallel with other hooks for the same event. Defaults to false. Set to true only when the hook script is safe to run concurrently with other hooks for the same event. If any hook for an event does not have this set to true, all hooks for that event run sequentially regardless of hook.jobs. Only configured (named) hooks need to declare this. Traditional hooks found in the hooks directory do not need to, and run in parallel when the effective job count is greater than 1. See git-hook(1). one cautious friend ruins the parallel party 😔
hook.<event>.enabled — switch to enable or disable all hooks for the <event> hook event. When set to false, no hooks fire for that event, regardless of any per-hook hook.<friendly-name>.enabled settings. Defaults to true. See git-hook(1).

Note on naming: <event> must be the event name (e.g. pre-commit), not a hook friendly-name. Since using a known event name as a friendly-name is disallowed (see hook.<friendly-name>.event above), there is no ambiguity between event-level and per-hook .enabled settings for known events. For unknown events, if a friendly-name matches the event name despite the warning, .enabled is treated as per-hook only. 🧠

hook.<event>.jobs — specifies how many hooks can be run simultaneously for the <event> hook event (e.g. hook.post-receive.jobs = 4). Overrides hook.jobs for this specific event. The same parallelism restrictions apply: this setting has no effect unless all configured hooks for the event have hook.<friendly-name>.parallel set to true. Set to -1 to use the number of available CPU cores. Must be a positive integer or -1; zero is rejected with a warning. See git-hook(1).

Note on naming: although this key resembles hook.<friendly-name>.* (a per-hook setting), <event> must be the event name, not a hook friendly name. The key component is stored literally and looked up by event name at runtime with no translation between the two namespaces. A key like hook.my-hook.jobs is stored under "my-hook" but the lookup at runtime uses the event name (e.g. "post-receive"), so hook.my-hook.jobs is silently ignored even when my-hook is registered for that event. Use hook.post-receive.jobs or any other valid event name when setting hook.<event>.jobs. 💀 this one will gaslight you if you're not careful

hook.jobs — specifies how many hooks can be run simultaneously during parallelized hook execution. If unspecified, defaults to 1 (serial execution). Set to -1 to use the number of available CPU cores. Can be overridden on a per-event basis with hook.<event>.jobs. Some hooks always run sequentially regardless of this setting because they operate on shared data and cannot safely be parallelized:
- applypatch-msg, prepare-commit-msg, commit-msg — Receive a commit message file and may rewrite it in place. ✍️
- pre-commit, post-checkout, push-to-checkout, post-commit — Access the working tree, index, or repository state. 🌳

This setting has no effect unless all configured hooks for the event have hook.<friendly-name>.parallel set to true. 🔒

So like, for pre-push hooks — which normally keep stdout and stderr separate — setting this to a value greater than 1 (or just passing -j) will merge stdout into stderr so parallel output gets de-interleaved correctly. Slay.

🌐 the `http.*` family (yes we're doing all of them) 💅

http.proxy — Overrides the HTTP proxy. Normally this is set up via the http_proxy, https_proxy, and all_proxy environment variables (peep curl(1) for the deets). And here's the cute part: on top of the syntax curl already gets, you can hand it a proxy string with a user name but no password — and git will go get one the same way it does for all your other credentials. See gitcredentials(7) for more. So the syntax is [protocol://][user[:password]@]proxyhost[:port][/path]. Also this can be overridden per-remote; see remote.<name>.proxy.

Any proxy, however you configured it, has to be completely transparent — it must not modify, transform, or buffer the request or response in any way, shape, or form. Proxies that aren't fully transparent are known to cause various forms of breakage with Git. 😭 Like, don't do it bestie.

http.proxyAuthMethod — Sets the method used to authenticate against the HTTP proxy. Heads up: this only kicks in if the proxy string you configured actually contains a user name part (so, the form user@host or user@host:port). Can be overridden per-remote — see remote.<name>.proxyAuthMethod. And both of those can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_PROXY_AUTHMETHOD environment variable. The possible values:
- anyauth — automatically picks a suitable authentication method. The assumption is that the proxy answers an unauthenticated request with a 407 status code plus one or more Proxy-authenticate headers listing supported authentication methods. This is the default. ✨
- basic — HTTP Basic authentication
- digest — HTTP Digest authentication; this is the one that keeps the password from being transmitted to the proxy in clear text 🔐
- negotiate — GSS-Negotiate authentication (compare the --negotiate option of curl(1))
- ntlm — NTLM authentication (compare the --ntlm option of curl(1))
http.proxySSLCert — The pathname of a file storing a client certificate, used to authenticate with an HTTPS proxy. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_CERT environment variable.
http.proxySSLKey — The pathname of a file storing a private key, used to authenticate with an HTTPS proxy. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_KEY environment variable.
http.proxySSLCertPasswordProtected — Turns on Git's own password prompt for the proxy SSL certificate. Otherwise OpenSSL will prompt the user — possibly many times 😩 — if the certificate or private key is encrypted. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_CERT_PASSWORD_PROTECTED environment variable.
http.proxySSLCAInfo — Pathname to the file containing the certificate bundle that should be used to verify the proxy with when you're using an HTTPS proxy. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_CAINFO environment variable.
http.emptyAuth — Attempt authentication without seeking a username or password. This lets you attempt GSS-Negotiate authentication without specifying a username in the URL, since libcurl normally requires a username for authentication. Possible values:
- auto (default) — send empty credentials only if the server's 401 response advertises an authentication mechanism that requires them (like GSS-Negotiate); otherwise fall back to prompting via the credential helper.
- true — always send empty credentials on the very first request, before receiving any 401 response from the server.
- false — never send empty credentials. Mechanisms that require empty credentials or an explicit username, like GSS-Negotiate, will not work. 💀
http.proactiveAuth — Attempt authentication without first making an unauthenticated attempt and receiving a 401 response. This can be used to ensure that all requests are authenticated. If http.emptyAuth is set to true, this value has no effect.

If the credential helper you're using specifies an authentication scheme (i.e., via the authtype field), that value will be used; if a username and password is provided without a scheme, then Basic authentication is used. The value of the option determines the scheme requested from the helper. Possible values:

basic — request Basic authentication from the helper.
auto — allow the helper to pick an appropriate scheme.
none — disable proactive authentication.

Note that TLS should always be used with this config, because otherwise it's way too easy to accidentally expose plaintext credentials if Basic authentication is selected. 🙈 Not the vibe.

http.delegation — Controls GSSAPI credential delegation. Delegation is disabled by default in libcurl since version 7.21.7. Set the parameter to tell the server what it's allowed to delegate when it comes to user credentials. Used with GSS/kerberos. Possible values:
- none — don't allow any delegation.
- policy — delegates if and only if the OK-AS-DELEGATE flag is set in the Kerberos service ticket, which is a matter of realm policy.
- always — unconditionally allow the server to delegate.
http.extraHeader — Pass an additional HTTP header when communicating with a server. If more than one such entry exists, all of them get added as extra headers. And to allow overriding settings inherited from the system config, an empty value will reset the extra headers to the empty list. Clean slate energy ✨
http.cookieFile — The pathname of a file containing previously stored cookie lines, which should be used in the Git http session if they match the server. The file format of the file you read cookies from should be plain HTTP headers or the Netscape/Mozilla cookie file format (see curl(1)). Set it to an empty string to accept only new cookies from the server and send them back in successive requests within the same connection. NOTE that the file specified with http.cookieFile is used only as input unless http.saveCookies is set. 🍪
http.saveCookies — If set, store cookies received during requests to the file specified by http.cookieFile. Has no effect if http.cookieFile is unset, or set to an empty string.
http.version — Use the specified HTTP protocol version when talking to a server. If you want to force the default. The available and default version depend on libcurl. Currently the possible values of this option are:
- HTTP/2
- HTTP/1.1
http.curloptResolve — Hostname resolution info that libcurl will use first when sending HTTP requests. This info should be in one of the following formats:
- [+]HOST:PORT:ADDRESS[,ADDRESS]
- -HOST:PORT

The first format redirects all requests to the given HOST:PORT to the provided ADDRESS(es). The second format clears all previous config values for that HOST:PORT combination. And to allow easy overriding of all the settings inherited from the system config, an empty value will reset all resolution information to the empty list.

http.sslVersion — The SSL version to use when negotiating an SSL connection, if you want to force the default. The available and default version depend on whether libcurl was built against NSS or OpenSSL and the particular configuration of the crypto library in use. Internally this sets the CURLOPT_SSL_VERSION option; see the libcurl documentation for more details on the format of this option and for the ssl versions supported. Currently the possible values of this option are:
- sslv2
- sslv3
- tlsv1
- tlsv1.0
- tlsv1.1
- tlsv1.2
- tlsv1.3

Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_VERSION environment variable. To force git to use libcurl's default ssl version and ignore any explicit http.sslversion option, set GIT_SSL_VERSION to the empty string. 🎀

http.sslCipherList — A list of SSL ciphers to use when negotiating an SSL connection. The available ciphers depend on whether libcurl was built against NSS or OpenSSL and the particular configuration of the crypto library in use. Internally this sets the CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST option; see the libcurl documentation for more details on the format of this list.

Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST environment variable. To force git to use libcurl's default cipher list and ignore any explicit http.sslCipherList option, set GIT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST to the empty string.

http.sslVerify — Whether to verify the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Defaults to true. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY environment variable.
http.sslCert — File containing the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT environment variable.
http.sslKey — File containing the SSL private key when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_KEY environment variable.
http.sslCertPasswordProtected — Turns on Git's password prompt for the SSL certificate. Otherwise OpenSSL will prompt the user, possibly many times, if the certificate or private key is encrypted. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT_PASSWORD_PROTECTED environment variable.
http.sslCAInfo — File containing the certificates to verify the peer with when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CAINFO environment variable.
http.sslCAPath — Path containing files with the CA certificates to verify the peer with when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CAPATH environment variable.
http.sslBackend — Name of the SSL backend to use (e.g. "openssl" or "schannel"). This option is ignored if cURL lacks support for choosing the SSL backend at runtime.
http.sslCertType — Type of client certificate used when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. "PEM" and "DER" are supported when using the openssl or gnutls backends. "P12" is supported on "openssl", "schannel", "securetransport", and gnutls 8.11+. See also libcurl CURLOPT_SSLCERTTYPE. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT_TYPE environment variable. 🦋

`http.sslKeyType`</p>

So your client private key for HTTPS fetch/push — what type is it? Ngl this one's for the crypto girlies. Values are like "PEM", "DER", or "ENG". ✨ Only applies when you're on the "openssl" backend, and heads up, "DER" is not supported with openssl. It's particularly useful when set to "ENG" for authenticating with PKCS#11 tokens, with a PKCS#11 URL in the sslCert option. See also libcurl CURLOPT_SSLKEYTYPE. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_KEY_TYPE environment variable. 🔐

`http.schannelCheckRevoke`

Used to enforce or disable certificate revocation checks in cURL when http.sslBackend is set to "schannel". Defaults to true if unset. Only necessary to disable this if Git consistently errors and the message is about checking the revocation status of a certificate 😭. This option is ignored if cURL lacks support for setting the relevant SSL option at runtime.

`http.schannelUseSSLCAInfo`

As of cURL v7.60.0, the Secure Channel backend can use the certificate bundle provided via http.sslCAInfo, but that would override the Windows Certificate Store. Since this is not desirable by default, Git will tell cURL not to use that bundle by default when the schannel backend was configured via http.sslBackend — unless http.schannelUseSSLCAInfo overrides this behavior. 🪟

`http.pinnedPubkey`

The public key of the https service, bestie. It may either be the filename of a PEM or DER encoded public key file, or a string starting with sha256// followed by the base64 encoded sha256 hash of the public key. See also libcurl CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY. And fr fr, git will exit with an error if this option is set but not supported by cURL. 💀

`http.sslTry`

Attempt to use AUTH SSL/TLS and encrypted data transfers when connecting via regular FTP protocol. Might be needed if the FTP server requires it for security reasons, or if you just wish to connect securely whenever the remote FTP server supports it. Default is false since it might trigger certificate verification errors on misconfigured servers. 🙈

`http.maxRequests`

How many HTTP requests to launch in parallel. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_MAX_REQUESTS environment variable. Default is 5. 🏃‍♀️

`http.minSessions`

The number of curl sessions (counted across slots) to be kept across requests. They will not be ended with curl_easy_cleanup() until http_cleanup() is invoked. If USE_CURL_MULTI is not defined, this value will be capped at 1. Defaults to 1.

`http.postBuffer`

Maximum size in bytes of the buffer used by smart HTTP transports when POSTing data to the remote system. For requests larger than this buffer size, HTTP/1.1 and Transfer-Encoding: chunked is used to avoid creating a massive pack file locally. Default is 1 MiB, which is sufficient for most requests. 🎀

Note that raising this limit is only effective for disabling chunked transfer encoding, and therefore should be used only where the remote server or a proxy only supports HTTP/1.0 or is noncompliant with the HTTP standard. Raising this is not, in general, an effective solution for most push problems, but it can increase memory consumption significantly, since the entire buffer is allocated even for small pushes. 😭

`http.lowSpeedLimit`, `http.lowSpeedTime`

If the HTTP transfer speed, in bytes per second, is less than http.lowSpeedLimit for longer than http.lowSpeedTime seconds, the transfer is aborted. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT and GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_TIME environment variables. 🐌

`http.keepAliveIdle`

Specifies how long in seconds to wait on an idle connection before sending TCP keepalive probes (if supported by the OS). If unset, curl's default value is used. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_KEEPALIVE_IDLE environment variable.

`http.keepAliveInterval`

Specifies how long in seconds to wait between TCP keepalive probes (if supported by the OS). If unset, curl's default value is used. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_KEEPALIVE_INTERVAL environment variable.

`http.keepAliveCount`

Specifies how many TCP keepalive probes to send before giving up and terminating the connection (if supported by the OS). If unset, curl's default value is used. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_KEEPALIVE_COUNT environment variable. 🫶

`http.retryAfter`

Default wait time in seconds before retrying when a server returns HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) without a Retry-After header. Defaults to 0 (retry immediately). When a Retry-After header is present, its value takes precedence over this setting — however, automatic use of the server-provided Retry-After header requires libcurl 7.66.0 or later. On older versions, configure this setting manually to control the retry delay. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_RETRY_AFTER environment variable. See also http.maxRetries and http.maxRetryTime. 🔁

`http.maxRetries`

Maximum number of times to retry after receiving HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) responses. Set to 0 (the default) to disable retries. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_MAX_RETRIES environment variable. See also http.retryAfter and http.maxRetryTime.

`http.maxRetryTime`

Maximum time in seconds to wait for a single retry attempt when handling HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) responses. If the server requests a delay (via Retry-After header) or if http.retryAfter is configured with a value that exceeds this maximum, Git will fail immediately rather than waiting. Default is 300 seconds (5 minutes). Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_MAX_RETRY_TIME environment variable. See also http.retryAfter and http.maxRetries. ⏰

`http.noEPSV`

A boolean which disables using of EPSV ftp command by curl. This can be helpful with some "poor" ftp servers which don't support EPSV mode 😬. Can be overridden by the GIT_CURL_FTP_NO_EPSV environment variable. Default is false (curl will use EPSV).

`http.userAgent`

The HTTP USER_AGENT string presented to an HTTP server. The default value represents the version of the Git client such as git/1.7.1. This option allows you to override this value to a more common value such as Mozilla/4.0. This may be necessary, for instance, if connecting through a firewall that restricts HTTP connections to a set of common USER_AGENT strings (but not including those like git/1.7.1). Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable. 🕵️‍♀️

`http.followRedirects`

Whether git should follow HTTP redirects. If set to true, git will transparently follow any redirect issued by a server it encounters. If set to false, git will treat all redirects as errors. If set to initial, git will follow redirects only for the initial request to a remote, but not for subsequent follow-up HTTP requests. Since git uses the redirected URL as the base for the follow-up requests, this is generally sufficient. The default is initial. 🌈

`http.<url>.*`

Okay this one's the main character 👑 — any of the http.* options above can be applied selectively to some URLs. For a config key to match a URL, each element of the config key is compared to that of the URL, in the following order:

Scheme (e.g., https in https://example.com/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL.
Host/domain name (e.g., example.com in https://example.com/). This field must match between the config key and the URL. It is possible to specify a * as part of the host name to match all subdomains at this level. https://*.example.com/ for example would match https://foo.example.com/, but not https://foo.bar.example.com/.
Port number (e.g., 8080 in http://example.com:8080/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL. Omitted port numbers are automatically converted to the correct default for the scheme before matching.
Path (e.g., repo.git in https://example.com/repo.git). The path field of the config key must match the path field of the URL either exactly or as a prefix of slash-delimited path elements. This means a config key with path foo/ matches URL path foo/bar. A prefix can only match on a slash (/) boundary. Longer matches take precedence (so a config key with path foo/bar is a better match to URL path foo/bar than a config key with just path foo/).
User name (e.g., user in https://user@example.com/repo.git). If the config key has a user name it must match the user name in the URL exactly. If the config key does not have a user name, that config key will match a URL with any user name (including none), but at a lower precedence than a config key with a user name.

The list above is ordered by decreasing precedence — a URL that matches a config key's path is preferred to one that matches its user name. For example, if the URL is https://user@example.com/foo/bar a config key match of https://example.com/foo will be preferred over a config key match of https://user@example.com.

All URLs are normalized before attempting any matching (the password part, if embedded in the URL, is always ignored for matching purposes) so that equivalent URLs that are simply spelled differently will match properly. Environment variable settings always override any matches. The URLs that are matched against are those given directly to Git commands. This means any URLs visited as a result of a redirection do not participate in matching. 💅

`i18n.commitEncoding`

Character encoding the commit messages are stored in. Git itself does not care per se, but this information is necessary e.g. when importing commits from emails or in the gitk graphical history browser (and possibly in other places in the future or in other porcelains). See e.g. git-mailinfo(1). Defaults to utf-8. 🌍

`i18n.logOutputEncoding`

Character encoding the commit messages are converted to when running git log and friends. 🦋

`imap.folder`

The folder to drop the mails into, which is typically the Drafts folder. For example: INBOX.Drafts, INBOX/Drafts or [Gmail]/Drafts. The IMAP folder to interact with MUST be specified; the value of this configuration variable is used as the fallback default value when the --folder option is not given. 📬

`imap.tunnel`

Command used to set up a tunnel to the IMAP server through which commands will be piped instead of using a direct network connection to the server. Required when imap.host is not set. 🚇

imap.host — a URL that says which server we're talking to 💌. Use an imap:// prefix for non-secure connections and an imaps:// prefix for secure ones. It's ignored when imap.tunnel is set, but otherwise it's required, bestie — no host, no party.
imap.user — the username to use when logging in to the server. your lil name tag 🏷️
imap.pass — the password to use when logging in to the server. keep it secret, keep it safe 🤫
imap.port — an integer port number to connect to on the server. Defaults to 143 for imap:// hosts and 993 for imaps:// hosts. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set.
imap.sslverify — a boolean to enable/disable verification of the server certificate used by the SSL/TLS connection. Default is true. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set. (Turning this off is giving "i trust you bestie" energy — do it at your own risk 💀)
imap.preformattedHTML — a boolean to enable/disable the use of html encoding when sending a patch. An html encoded patch will be bracketed with <pre> and have a content type of text/html. Ironically, enabling this option causes Thunderbird to send the patch as a plain/text, format=fixed email. Default is false. the irony is literally the whole plot 😭
imap.authMethod — specify the authentication method for authenticating with the IMAP server. If Git was built with the NO_CURL option, or if your curl version is older than 7.34.0, or if you're running git-imap-send with the --no-curl option, the only supported methods are PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, OAUTHBEARER and XOAUTH2. If this is not set then git imap-send uses the basic IMAP plaintext LOGIN command.
include.path, includeIf.<condition>.path — special variables to include other configuration files 🫶. See the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section in the main git-config(1) documentation, specifically the "Includes" and "Conditional Includes" subsections. go read those, they're iconic.

index.recordEndOfIndexEntries — specifies whether the index file should include an "End Of Index Entry" section. This reduces index load time on multiprocessor machines but produces a message "ignoring EOIE extension" when reading the index using Git versions before 2.20. Defaults to true if index.threads has been explicitly enabled, false otherwise.
index.recordOffsetTable — specifies whether the index file should include an "Index Entry Offset Table" section. This reduces index load time on multiprocessor machines but produces a message "ignoring IEOT extension" when reading the index using Git versions before 2.20. Defaults to true if index.threads has been explicitly enabled, false otherwise. same vibe, different table 🪑✨
index.sparse — when enabled, write the index using sparse-directory entries. This has no effect unless core.sparseCheckout and core.sparseCheckoutCone are both enabled. Defaults to false.
index.threads — specifies the number of threads to spawn when loading the index. This is meant to reduce index load time on multiprocessor machines. Specifying 0 or true will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPUs and set the number of threads accordingly. Specifying 1 or false will disable multithreading. Defaults to true. parallelism slay 🔥
index.version — specify the version with which new index files should be initialized. This does not affect existing repositories. If feature.manyFiles is enabled, then the default is 4. new files only, okurrr 💅
index.skipHash — when enabled, do not compute the trailing hash for the index file. This accelerates Git commands that manipulate the index, such as git add, git commit, or git status. Instead of storing the checksum, write a trailing set of bytes with value zero, indicating that the computation was skipped.

If you enable index.skipHash, then Git clients older than 2.13.0 will refuse to parse the index and Git clients older than 2.40.0 will report an error during git fsck.

⚠️ like, this is a real compatibility consequence, bestie — old Git will straight up nope out 😭 read it twice.

init.templateDir — specify the directory from which templates will be copied. (See the "TEMPLATE DIRECTORY" section of git-init(1).) it's giving starter pack 🎁
init.defaultBranch — allows overriding the default branch name e.g. when initializing a new repository. name your baby whatever you want 👑
init.defaultObjectFormat — allows overriding the default object format for new repositories. See --object-format= in git-init(1). Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_HASH environment variable take precedence over this config.
init.defaultRefFormat — allows overriding the default ref storage format for new repositories. See --ref-format= in git-init(1). Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_REF_FORMAT environment variable take precedence over this config. the command line and env var are the main characters here 💅
init.defaultSubmodulePathConfig — a boolean that specifies if git init and git clone should automatically set extensions.submodulePathConfig to true. This allows all new repositories to automatically use the submodule path extension. Defaults to false when unset.

instaweb.browser — specify the program that will be used to browse your working repository in gitweb. See git-instaweb(1).
instaweb.httpd — the HTTP daemon command-line to start gitweb on your working repository. See git-instaweb(1).
instaweb.local — if true the web server started by git-instaweb(1) will be bound to the local IP (127.0.0.1). stay home bestie 🏠
instaweb.modulePath — the default module path for git-instaweb(1) to use instead of /usr/lib/apache2/modules. Only used if httpd is Apache.
instaweb.port — the port number to bind the gitweb httpd to. See git-instaweb(1).

interactive.singleKey — when set to true, allow the user to provide one-letter input with a single key (i.e., without hitting the Enter key) in interactive commands 🎹. This is currently used by the --patch mode of git-add(1), git-checkout(1), git-restore(1), git-commit(1), git-reset(1), and git-stash(1).
interactive.diffFilter — when an interactive command (such as git add --patch) shows a colorized diff, git will pipe the diff through the shell command defined by this configuration variable. The command may mark up the diff further for human consumption, provided that it retains a one-to-one correspondence with the lines in the original diff 🌈. Defaults to disabled (no filtering).

🚨 one-to-one correspondence, bestie — if your filter transforms the lines, the whole thing breaks. no adding extra lines, periodt.

log.abbrevCommit — if true, make git-log(1), git-show(1), and git-whatchanged(1) assume --abbrev-commit. You may override this option with --no-abbrev-commit.
log.date — set the default date-time mode for the log command. Setting a value for log.date is similar to using git log's --date option. See git-log(1) for details.

If the format is set to "auto:foo" and the pager is in use, format "foo" will be used for the date format. Otherwise, "default" will be used. cute lil auto-magic ✨

log.decorate — print out the ref names of any commits that are shown by the log command. Possible values are:
- short — the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ are not printed.
- full — the full ref name (including prefix) are printed.
- auto — if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown.

This is the same as the --decorate option of the git log. ✨

log.initialDecorationSet — by default, git log only shows decorations for certain known ref namespaces. If all is specified, then show all refs as decorations.
log.excludeDecoration — exclude the specified patterns from the log decorations. This is similar to the --decorate-refs-exclude command-line option, but the config option can be overridden by the --decorate-refs option.
log.diffMerges — set diff format to be used when --diff-merges=on is specified, see --diff-merges in git-log(1) for details. Defaults to separate.
log.follow — if true, git log will act as if the --follow option was used when a single <path> is given. This has the same limitations as --follow, i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files 🙈. one path only, bestie.
log.graphColors — a list of colors, separated by commas, that can be used to draw history lines in git log --graph. paint the timeline 🎨
log.graphIndent — if true, indent visual roots when rendering the graphs with --graph. Set true by default. It can be overriden with --[no-]graph-indent.
log.showRoot — if true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event 🎆. This is equivalent to a diff against an empty tree. Tools like git-log(1) or git-whatchanged(1), which normally hide the root commit will now show it. True by default.
log.showSignature — if true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and git-whatchanged(1) assume --show-signature.
log.mailmap — if true, makes git-log(1), git-show(1), and git-whatchanged(1) assume --use-mailmap, otherwise assume --no-use-mailmap. True by default.

lsrefs.unborn — may be "advertise" (the default), "allow", or "ignore". If "advertise", the server will respond to the client sending "unborn" (as described in gitprotocol-v2(5)) and will advertise support for this feature during the protocol v2 capability advertisement. "allow" is the same as "advertise" except that the server will not advertise support for this feature; this is useful for load-balanced servers that cannot be updated atomically (for example), since the administrator could configure "allow", then after a delay, configure "advertise". big rollout-brain energy 🧠✨
mailinfo.scissors — if true, makes git-mailinfo(1) (and therefore git-am(1)) act by default as if the --scissors option was provided on the command-line. When active, this feature removes everything from the message body before a scissors line (i.e. consisting mainly of ">8", "8<" and "-"). ✂️ snip snip
mailmap.file — the location of an augmenting mailmap file. The default mailmap, located in the root of the repository, is loaded first, then the mailmap file pointed to by this variable. The location of the mailmap file may be in a repository subdirectory, or somewhere outside of the repository itself. See git-shortlog(1) and git-blame(1). 📇
mailmap.blob — like mailmap.file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. If both mailmap.file and mailmap.blob are given, both are parsed, with entries from mailmap.file taking precedence. In a bare repository, this defaults to HEAD:.mailmap. In a non-bare repository, it defaults to empty.

💡 precedence check: mailmap.file wins, always. write it down.

maintenance.auto — this boolean config option controls whether some commands run git maintenance run --auto after doing their normal work. Defaults to true. lil background chore fairy 🧚✨

`maintenance.autoDetach`

Okay so bestie, lots of Git commands trigger automatic maintenance after they've written data into the repository ✨ This boolean config option is basically the vibe check on whether that automatic maintenance happens in the foreground or whether the maintenance process detaches and just keeps running in the background like it's got somewhere better to be 💅

If it's unset, the value of gc.autoDetach is used as a fallback. And it defaults to true if both of them are unset — which means the maintenance process will detach. Periodt.

`maintenance.strategy`

This string config option is your little menu of recommended strategies for repository maintenance 🎀 It controls which tasks get run during git maintenance run, provided no --task=<task> arguments are provided. This setting impacts manual maintenance, auto-maintenance and scheduled maintenance — the tasks that run may be different depending on the maintenance type. iykyk.

You can tweak the strategy further by setting maintenance.<task>.enabled and maintenance.<task>.schedule. If those are set, they're used instead of the defaults that maintenance.strategy hands you 🫶

The possible strategies are:

none — no tasks are run at all, literally nothing, a total rest day 💀 This is the default strategy for scheduled maintenance.
gc — runs the gc task.
geometric — performs geometric repacking of packfiles and keeps auxiliary data structures up-to-date. The strategy expires data in the reflog and removes worktrees that can't be located anymore. When the geometric repacking strategy would decide to do an all-into-one repack, then the strategy generates a cruft pack for all unreachable objects 🌈 Objects that are already part of a cruft pack will be expired. This repacking strategy is a full replacement for the gc strategy and is recommended for large repositories 👑 This is the default strategy for manual maintenance.
incremental — this setting optimizes for performing small maintenance activities that don't delete any data 🙈 It does not schedule the gc task, but it runs the prefetch and commit-graph tasks hourly, the loose-objects and incremental-repack tasks daily, and the pack-refs task weekly. Manual repository maintenance uses the gc task.

`maintenance.<task>.enabled`

A boolean config option that controls whether the maintenance task named <task> is run when no --task option is specified to git maintenance run 🦋 These config values are ignored if a --task option exists. By default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true.

`maintenance.<task>.schedule`

This one controls whether or not the given <task> runs during a git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency> command ⭐ The value has to be one of "hourly", "daily", or "weekly".

`maintenance.commit-graph.auto`

An integer config option controlling how often the commit-graph task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 🎀

If zero, the commit-graph task will not run with the --auto option.
A negative value forces the task to run every single time, no cap.
Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of reachable commits that are not in the commit-graph file is at least the value of maintenance.commit-graph.auto.

The default value is 100.

`maintenance.loose-objects.auto`

An integer config option for how often the loose-objects task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 💖

zero → the loose-objects task will not run with the --auto option.
Negative → forces the task to run every time.
Positive → the command should run when the number of loose objects is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto.

The default value is 100.

`maintenance.loose-objects.batchSize`

An integer config option that caps the maximum number of loose objects written into a packfile during the loose-objects task 🍓 The default is fifty thousand. Use value 0 to indicate no limit — go feral, bestie.

`maintenance.incremental-repack.auto`

An integer config option for how often the incremental-repack task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 🧚

zero → the incremental-repack task will not run with the --auto option.
Negative → forces the task to run every time.
Positive → the command should run when the number of pack-files not in the multi-pack-index is at least the value of maintenance.incremental-repack.auto.

The default value is 10.

`maintenance.geometric-repack.auto`

An integer config option for how often the geometric-repack task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 💜

zero → the geometric-repack task will not run with the --auto option.
Negative → forces the task to run every time.
Positive → the command should run either when there are packfiles that need to be merged together to retain the geometric progression, or when there are at least this many loose objects that would be written into a new packfile.

The default value is 6700.

`maintenance.geometric-repack.splitFactor`

An integer config option controlling the factor used for the geometric sequence ✨ See the --geometric= option in git-repack(1) for more details. Defaults to 2.

`maintenance.reflog-expire.auto`

An integer config option for how often the reflog-expire task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 🌸

zero → the reflog-expire task will not run with the --auto option.
Negative → forces the task to run every time.
Positive → the command should run when the number of expired reflog entries in the "HEAD" reflog is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto.

The default value is 100.

`maintenance.rerere-gc.auto`

An integer config option for how often the rerere-gc task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 🎀

zero → the rerere-gc task will not run with the --auto option.
Negative → forces the task to run every time.
Positive → the command should run when the estimated number of stale entries that would be pruned is greater than or equal to the configured value.

The default value is 512.

`maintenance.worktree-prune.auto`

An integer config option for how often the worktree-prune task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto 🦋

zero → the worktree-prune task will not run with the --auto option.
Negative → forces the task to run every time.
Positive → the command should run when the number of prunable worktrees exceeds the value.

The default value is 1.

`man.viewer`

Specifies the programs that may be used to display help in the man format 💅 See git-help(1).

`man.<tool>.cmd`

Specifies the command to invoke the specified man viewer 👑 The specified command is evaluated in shell with the man page passed as an argument. (See git-help(1).)

`man.<tool>.path`

Overrides the path for the given tool that may be used to display help in the man format ⭐ See git-help(1).

`merge.conflictStyle`

Specifies the style in which conflicted hunks are written out to working tree files upon merge 😭 The default is "merge", which shows a <<<<<<< conflict marker, changes made by one side, a ======= marker, changes made by the other side, and then a >>>>>>> marker. An alternate style, "diff3", adds a ||||||| marker and the original text before the ======= marker 💀 The "merge" style tends to produce smaller conflict regions than diff3, both because of the exclusion of the original text, and because when a subset of lines match on the two sides, they're just pulled out of the conflict region.

Another alternate style, "zdiff3", is similar to diff3 but removes matching lines on the two sides from the conflict region when those matching lines appear near either the beginning or end of a conflict region 🙈

`merge.defaultToUpstream`

If merge is called without any commit argument, merge the upstream branches configured for the current branch by using their last observed values stored in their remote-tracking branches 🌈 The values of the branch.<current branch>.merge that name the branches at the remote named by branch.<current-branch>.remote are consulted, and then they're mapped via remote.<remote>.fetch to their corresponding remote-tracking branches, and the tips of these tracking branches are merged. Defaults to true.

`merge.ff`

By default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that's a descendant of the current commit — instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded ✨

When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line).
When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line).

`merge.verifySignatures`

If true, this is equivalent to the --verify-signatures command line option 🔥 See git-merge(1) for details.

`merge.branchdesc`

In addition to branch names, populates the log message with the branch description text associated with them 🎀 Defaults to false.

`merge.log`

In addition to branch names, populates the log message with at most the specified number of one-line descriptions from the actual commits that are being merged 💖 Defaults to false, and true is a synonym for 20.

`merge.suppressDest`

By adding a glob that matches the names of integration branches to this multi-valued configuration variable, the default merge message computed for merges into these integration branches will omit "into <branch-name>" from its title 👑

An element with an empty value can be used to clear the list of globs accumulated from previous configuration entries. When there's no merge.suppressDest variable defined, the default value of master is used for backward compatibility. iykyk 🫶

merge.renameLimit — how many files Git will actually look at in the exhaustive part of rename detection during a merge. ✨ No value set? It falls back to whatever diff.renameLimit says. And if neither merge.renameLimit nor diff.renameLimit is set, it currently defaults to 7000. Heads up bestie: this setting does absolutely nothing if rename detection is turned off. 💅
merge.renames — does Git detect renames or not? Set it to false and rename detection is disabled, periodt. Set it to true and basic rename detection is on. Defaults to the value of diff.renames. 🦋
merge.directoryRenames — does Git detect directory renames? This one's about what happens at merge time to new files added to a directory on one side of history when that directory got renamed on the other side of history. Possible values, get into it:
- false — directory rename detection is disabled, meaning those new files just get left behind in the old directory. 😭
- true — directory rename detection is enabled, meaning those new files get moved into the new directory. slay. 💖
- conflict — a conflict gets reported for such paths. 🙈

Also important: if merge.renames is false, then merge.directoryRenames is ignored and treated as false. Defaults to conflict.

merge.renormalize — tells Git that the canonical representation of files in the repo has changed over time (like, earlier commits recorded text files with CRLF line endings but recent ones use LF line endings). In a repo like that, for each file where a three-way content merge is needed, Git can convert the data recorded in commits to a canonical form before doing the merge, so you get fewer unnecessary conflicts. 🎀 For more info, see the section "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in gitattributes(5).
merge.stat — what, if anything, Git prints between ORIG_HEAD and the merge result at the end of the merge. The options are:
- false — show nothing. 💀
- true — show git diff --diffstat --summary ORIG_HEAD.
- compact — show git diff --compact-summary ORIG_HEAD.

But plot twist: any unrecognised value (like, a value added by a future version of Git) is taken as true instead of triggering an error. Defaults to true. ✨

merge.autoStash — set it to true and Git automatically creates a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, then applies it after the operation ends. Which means you can run merge on a dirty worktree, no cap. 🫶 But use it with care: the final stash application after a successful merge might result in non-trivial conflicts. 😭 This option can be overridden by the --no-autostash and --autostash options of git-merge(1). Defaults to false.
merge.tool — controls which merge tool git-mergetool(1) uses. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined. 👑
merge.guitool — controls which merge tool git-mergetool(1) uses when the -g/--gui flag is specified. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined. 🌈
- araxis — use Araxis Merge (requires a graphical session)
- bc — use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
- bc3 — use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
- bc4 — use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
- codecompare — use Code Compare (requires a graphical session)
- deltawalker — use DeltaWalker (requires a graphical session)
- diffmerge — use DiffMerge (requires a graphical session)
- diffuse — use Diffuse (requires a graphical session)
- ecmerge — use ECMerge (requires a graphical session)
- emerge — use Emacs' Emerge
- examdiff — use ExamDiff Pro (requires a graphical session)
- guiffy — use Guiffy’s Diff Tool (requires a graphical session)
- gvimdiff — use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
- gvimdiff1 — use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
- gvimdiff2 — use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
- gvimdiff3 — use gVim (requires a graphical session) where only the MERGED file is shown
- kdiff3 — use KDiff3 (requires a graphical session)
- meld — use Meld (requires a graphical session) with optional auto merge (see git help mergetool's CONFIGURATION section)
- nvimdiff — use Neovim with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
- nvimdiff1 — use Neovim with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
- nvimdiff2 — use Neovim with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
- nvimdiff3 — use Neovim where only the MERGED file is shown
- opendiff — use FileMerge (requires a graphical session)
- p4merge — use HelixCore P4Merge (requires a graphical session)
- smerge — use Sublime Merge (requires a graphical session)
- tkdiff — use TkDiff (requires a graphical session)
- tortoisemerge — use TortoiseMerge (requires a graphical session)
- vimdiff — use Vim with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
- vimdiff1 — use Vim with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
- vimdiff2 — use Vim with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
- vimdiff3 — use Vim where only the MERGED file is shown
- vscode — use Visual Studio Code (requires a graphical session)
- winmerge — use WinMerge (requires a graphical session)
- xxdiff — use xxdiff (requires a graphical session)
merge.verbosity — controls how much output the recursive merge strategy shows. Level 0 outputs nothing except a final error message if conflicts were detected. Level 1 outputs only conflicts, 2 outputs conflicts and file changes. Level 5 and above outputs debugging information. The default is level 2. Can be overridden by the GIT_MERGE_VERBOSITY environment variable. 🧚
merge.<driver>.name — defines a human-readable name for a custom low-level merge driver. See gitattributes(5) for details. ⭐
merge.<driver>.driver — defines the command that implements a custom low-level merge driver. See gitattributes(5) for details.
merge.<driver>.recursive — names a low-level merge driver to be used when performing an internal merge between common ancestors. See gitattributes(5) for details.
mergetool.<tool>.path — overrides the path for the given tool. Super useful in case your tool isn't in the $PATH. 💅
mergetool.<tool>.cmd — specifies the command to invoke the specified merge tool. The command gets evaluated in shell with these variables available: BASE is the name of a temporary file containing the common base of the files to be merged, if available; LOCAL is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file on the current branch; REMOTE is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file from the branch being merged; MERGED contains the name of the file to which the merge tool should write the results of a successful merge. 🎀
mergetool.<tool>.hideResolved — lets you override the global mergetool.hideResolved value for one specific tool. See mergetool.hideResolved for the full description.
mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode — for a custom merge command, this says whether the exit code of the merge command can be used to determine whether the merge was successful. If this isn't set to true, then the merge target file timestamp gets checked, and the merge is assumed successful if the file has been updated; otherwise, the user is prompted to indicate the success of the merge. 🙈
mergetool.meld.hasOutput — older versions of meld don't support the --output option. Git will try to detect whether meld supports --output by inspecting the output of meld --help. Configuring mergetool.meld.hasOutput makes Git skip those checks and just use the configured value instead. Setting mergetool.meld.hasOutput to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --output option, and false avoids using --output. 🔥
mergetool.meld.useAutoMerge — when --auto-merge is given, meld merges all non-conflicting parts automatically, highlights the conflicting parts, and waits for the user's decision. Setting mergetool.meld.useAutoMerge to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --auto-merge option with meld. Setting it to auto makes git detect whether --auto-merge is supported and only use --auto-merge when it's available. A value of false avoids using --auto-merge altogether, and is the default value. ✨
mergetool.<variant>.layout — configures the split window layout for vimdiff's <variant>, which is any of vimdiff, nvimdiff, gvimdiff. When you launch git mergetool with --tool=<variant> (or without --tool if merge.tool is configured as <variant>), Git consults mergetool.<variant>.layout to figure out the tool's layout. If the variant-specific config isn't available, vimdiff's is used as fallback. And if that's not available either, a default layout with 4 windows gets used. To configure the layout, see the BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section in git-mergetool(1). 🦋
mergetool.hideResolved — during a merge, Git automatically resolves as many conflicts as it can and writes the $MERGED file containing conflict markers around any conflicts it can't resolve; $LOCAL and $REMOTE normally are the versions of the file from before Git's conflict resolution. This flag causes $LOCAL and $REMOTE to be overwritten so that only the unresolved conflicts are presented to the merge tool. Can be configured per-tool via the mergetool.<tool>.hideResolved configuration variable. Defaults to false. 💖

🎀 `mergetool.keepBackup`

So after a merge goes down, that original file — the messy one with all the conflict markers in it — can get saved as a file with a .orig extension. If you set this to false, bestie, that file does not get preserved. Defaults to true (i.e. keep the backup files). 💅

🫶 `mergetool.keepTemporaries`

When Git invokes a custom merge tool, it uses a set of temporary files to pass to the tool. If the tool returns an error and this variable is set to true, then those temporary files will be preserved; otherwise, they get removed after the tool has exited. Defaults to false. ✨

🦋 `mergetool.writeToTemp`

Git writes temporary BASE, LOCAL, and REMOTE versions of conflicting files in the worktree by default. Set this true and Git will attempt to use a temporary directory for these files instead. Defaults to false.

🌸 `mergetool.prompt`

Prompt before each invocation of the merge resolution program. That's it, that's the whole vibe. 🙈

👑 `mergetool.guiDefault`

Set it to true to use the merge.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select merge.guitool or merge.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. The default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the merge.guitool to be used. no cap.

💖 `notes.mergeStrategy`

Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union, or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section of git-notes(1) for more information on each strategy.

This setting can be overridden by passing the --strategy option to git-notes(1).

🧚 `notes.<name>.mergeStrategy`

Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general notes.mergeStrategy. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section in git-notes(1) for more information on the available strategies. 🍓

⭐ `notes.displayRef`

Which ref (or refs, if a glob or specified more than once), in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages with the git log family of commands.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored. 💀

This setting can be disabled by the --no-notes option to the git-log(1) family of commands, or by the --notes=<ref> option accepted by those commands.

The effective value of core.notesRef (possibly overridden by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of refs to be displayed.

🌈 `notes.rewrite.<command>`

When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase), if this variable is false, git will not copy notes from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true. See also notes.rewriteRef below.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

🔥 `notes.rewriteMode`

When copying notes during a rewrite (see the notes.rewrite.<command> option), this determines what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to concatenate.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

💜 `notes.rewriteRef`

When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. May be a glob, in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You may also specify this configuration several times. 🫶

Does not have a default value; you must configure this variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit notes.

Can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable. See notes.rewrite.<command> above for a further description of its format.

🎀 `pack.window`

The size of the window used by git-pack-objects(1) when no window size is given on the command line. Defaults to 10.

💅 `pack.depth`

The maximum delta depth used by git-pack-objects(1) when no maximum depth is given on the command line. Defaults to 50. Maximum value is 4095. ikyk. 👑

✨ `pack.windowMemory`

The maximum size of memory that is consumed by each thread in git-pack-objects(1) for pack window memory when no limit is given on the command line. The value can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". When left unconfigured (or set explicitly to 0), there will be no limit. 🦋

🌸 `pack.compression`

An integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If not set, defaults to core.compression. If that is not set, defaults to -1, the zlib default, which is "a default compromise between speed and compression (currently equivalent to level 6)."

bestie, heads up: changing the compression level will not automatically recompress all existing objects. You can force recompression by passing the -F option to git-repack(1). 🫶

🍓 `pack.allowPackReuse`

When true or "single", and when reachability bitmaps are enabled, pack-objects will try to send parts of the bitmapped packfile verbatim. When "multi", and when a multi-pack reachability bitmap is available, pack-objects will try to send parts of all packs in the MIDX.

If only a single pack bitmap is available, and pack.allowPackReuse is set to "multi", reuse parts of just the bitmapped packfile. This can reduce memory and CPU usage to serve fetches, but might result in sending a slightly larger pack. Defaults to true.

🧚 `pack.island`

An extended regular expression configuring a set of delta islands. See "DELTA ISLANDS" in git-pack-objects(1) for details. 🏝️

💜 `pack.islandCore`

Specify an island name which gets to have its objects be packed first. This creates a kind of pseudo-pack at the front of one pack, so that the objects from the specified island are hopefully faster to copy into any pack that should be served to a user requesting these objects. In practice this means that the island specified should likely correspond to what is the most commonly cloned in the repo. See also "DELTA ISLANDS" in git-pack-objects(1).

⭐ `pack.deltaCacheSize`

The maximum memory in bytes used for caching deltas in git-pack-objects(1) before writing them out to a pack. This cache is used to speed up the writing object phase by not having to recompute the final delta result once the best match for all objects is found. Repacking large repositories on machines which are tight with memory might be badly impacted by this though, especially if this cache pushes the system into swapping. 😭 A value of 0 means no limit. The smallest size of 1 byte may be used to virtually disable this cache. Defaults to 256 MiB.

🌈 `pack.deltaCacheLimit`

The maximum size of a delta, that is cached in git-pack-objects(1). This cache is used to speed up the writing object phase by not having to recompute the final delta result once the best match for all objects is found. Defaults to 1000. Maximum value is 65535.

🔥 `pack.threads`

Specifies the number of threads to spawn when searching for best delta matches. This requires that git-pack-objects(1) be compiled with pthreads — otherwise this option is ignored with a warning. ⚠️ This is meant to reduce packing time on multiprocessor machines. The required amount of memory for the delta search window is however multiplied by the number of threads. Specifying 0 will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPUs and set the number of threads accordingly.

💖 `pack.indexVersion`

Specify the default pack index version. Valid values are 1 for legacy pack index used by Git versions prior to 1.5.2, and 2 for the new pack index with capabilities for packs larger than 4 GB as well as proper protection against the repacking of corrupted packs. Version 2 is the default. Note that version 2 is enforced and this config option is ignored whenever the corresponding pack is larger than 2 GB.

If you have an old Git that does not understand the version 2 *.idx file, cloning or fetching over a non-native protocol (e.g. "http") that will copy both *.pack file and corresponding *.idx file from the other side may give you a repository that cannot be accessed with your older version of Git. If the *.pack file is smaller than 2 GB, however, you can use git-index-pack(1) on the *.pack file to regenerate the *.idx file. slay. 💅

🎀 `pack.packSizeLimit`

The maximum size of a pack. This setting only affects packing to a file when repacking, i.e. the git:// protocol is unaffected. It can be overridden by the --max-pack-size option of git-repack(1). Reaching this limit results in the creation of multiple packfiles.

ngl bestie, note that this option is rarely useful, and may result in a larger total on-disk size (because Git will not store deltas between packs) and worse runtime performance (object lookup within multiple packs is slower than a single pack, and optimizations like reachability bitmaps cannot cope with multiple packs). 💀

If you need to actively run Git using smaller packfiles (e.g., because your filesystem does not support large files), this option may help. But if your goal is to transmit a packfile over a medium that supports limited sizes (e.g., removable media that cannot store the whole repository), you are likely better off creating a single large packfile and splitting it using a generic multi-volume archive tool (e.g., Unix split). 🙈

The minimum size allowed is limited to 1 MiB. The default is unlimited. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

🦋 `pack.useBitmaps`

When true, git will use pack bitmaps (if available) when packing to stdout (e.g., during the server side of a fetch). Defaults to true. You should not generally need to turn this off unless you are debugging pack bitmaps. 👑

pack.useBitmapBoundaryTraversal — set this to true and Git busts out an experimental algorithm for computing reachability queries with bitmaps ✨. Instead of building up complete bitmaps for all the negated tips and then OR-ing them together, it treats negated tips that already have bitmaps as additive (so: OR-ing them into the result if they exist, ignoring them otherwise), and builds up a bitmap at the boundary instead. Kinda icon energy, ngl.

Heads up though: when using this algorithm, Git may include too many objects as a result of not opening up trees belonging to certain UNINTERESTING commits. That inexactness? It matches the non-bitmap traversal algorithm, so it's not a new vibe, it's the old vibe 💀.

In many cases this can give you a speed-up over the exact algorithm, particularly when there's poor bitmap coverage of the negated side of the query. Slay for performance 🚀.

pack.useSparse — when true, git will default to using the --sparse option in git pack-objects when the --revs option is present 🎀. This algorithm only walks trees that appear in paths that introduce new objects. That can have significant performance benefits when computing a pack to send a small change. But — and this is the important part — it's possible that extra objects are added to the pack-file if the included commits contain certain types of direct renames. Default is true.
pack.usePathWalk — turn on the --path-walk option by default for git pack-objects processes 🦋. See git-pack-objects(1) for full details, bestie.
pack.preferBitmapTips — specifies a ref hierarchy (e.g., "refs/heads/"); you can give it multiple times to specify more than one hierarchy 💅. When selecting which commits will receive bitmaps, prefer a commit at the tip of a reference that's contained in any of the configured hierarchies.

Okay so important nuance: setting this configuration to refs/foo/ does not mean the commits at the tips of refs/foo/bar and refs/foo/baz will necessarily be selected. Why? Because commits are selected for bitmaps from within a series of windows of variable length 👀.

But if a commit at the tip of any reference which is a suffix of any value of this configuration is seen in a window, it is immediately given preference over any other commit in that window. Instantly. No queue. Main character commit 🌟.

pack.writeBitmaps (deprecated) — this is a deprecated synonym for repack.writeBitmaps. Use the other one, bestie 🙈.
pack.writeBitmapHashCache — when true, git will include a "hash cache" section in the bitmap index (if one is written) ✨. This cache can be used to feed git's delta heuristics, potentially leading to better deltas between bitmapped and non-bitmapped objects (e.g., when serving a fetch between an older, bitmapped pack and objects that have been pushed since the last gc). The downside? It consumes 4 bytes per object of disk space 😭. Defaults to true.

Also, when writing a multi-pack reachability bitmap, no new namehashes are computed; instead, any namehashes stored in an existing bitmap are permuted into their appropriate location when writing a new bitmap 🌀.

pack.writeBitmapLookupTable — when true, Git will include a "lookup table" section in the bitmap index (if one is written) 🎀. This table is used to defer loading individual bitmaps as late as possible. That can be beneficial in repositories that have relatively large bitmap indexes. Defaults to false.
pack.readReverseIndex — when true, git will read any .rev file(s) that may be available (see: gitformat-pack(5)) 💖. When false, the reverse index will be generated from scratch and stored in memory. Defaults to true.
pack.writeReverseIndex — when true, git will write a corresponding .rev file (see: gitformat-pack(5)) for each new packfile that it writes in all places except for git-fast-import(1) and in the bulk checkin mechanism 👑. Defaults to true.

pager.<cmd> — if the value is boolean, it turns pagination on or off for the output of a particular Git subcommand when writing to a tty 🌸. Otherwise, it turns on pagination for the subcommand using the pager specified by the value of pager.<cmd>. If --paginate or --no-pager is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option — command line always wins, periodt 💅. And if you wanna disable pagination for all commands, set core.pager or GIT_PAGER to cat.
pretty.<name> — an alias for a --pretty= format string, as specified in git-log(1) ✨. Any aliases defined here can be used just as the built-in pretty formats could. For example, running

git config pretty.changelog "format:* %H %s"

would cause the invocation git log --pretty=changelog to be equivalent to running git log "--pretty=format:* %H %s". So cute, so convenient 🎀.

Watch out: an alias with the same name as a built-in format will be silently ignored 💀. No error, no warning, just vibes and your alias doing nothing.

promisor.quiet — if set to "true", assume --quiet when fetching additional objects for a partial clone 🤫.
promisor.advertise — if set to "true", a server will use the "promisor-remote" capability, see gitprotocol-v2(5), to advertise the promisor remotes it's using, if it uses some 📢. Default is "false", which means the "promisor-remote" capability is not advertised.
promisor.sendFields — a comma or space separated list of additional remote related field names 💖. A server sends these field names and the associated field values from its configuration when advertising its promisor remotes using the "promisor-remote" capability, see gitprotocol-v2(5). Currently, only the "partialCloneFilter" and "token" field names are supported 👑.
- partialCloneFilter — contains the partial clone filter used for the remote.
- token — contains an authentication token for the remote 🔐.

When a field name is part of this list and a corresponding "remote.foo.<field-name>" config variable is set on the server to a non-empty value, then the field name and value are sent when advertising the promisor remote "foo" ✨.

This list has no effect unless the "promisor.advertise" config variable is set to "true", and the "name" and "url" fields are always advertised regardless of this setting 💅.

promisor.acceptFromServer — controls which promisor remotes advertised by a server (using the "promisor-remote" protocol capability) a client will accept 🤝. By accepting a promisor remote, the client agrees that the server might omit objects that are lazily fetchable from this promisor remote from its responses to "fetch" and "clone" requests.

Note that this option does not cause new remotes to be automatically created in the client's configuration 🫶. It only allows remotes which are somehow already configured to be trusted for the current operation, or their fields to be updated (if promisor.storeFields is set and the remote already exists locally). To allow Git to automatically create and persist new remotes from server advertisements, use promisor.acceptFromServerUrl.

The available options are:

none (default) — no promisor remote advertised by a server will be accepted 🙅‍♀️.
knownUrl — the client will accept promisor remotes that are already configured on the client and have both the same name and the same URL as advertised by the server 🔒. This is more secure than all or knownName, and should be used if possible instead of those options.
knownName — the client will accept promisor remotes that are already configured on the client and have the same name as those advertised by the server. This is not very secure 😬, but could be used in a corporate setup where servers and clients are trusted to not switch names and URLs.
all — the client will accept all the promisor remotes a server might advertise 💀. This is the least secure option and should only be used in fully trusted environments.

Name and URL comparisons are case-sensitive ⚠️. See gitprotocol-v2(5) for protocol details.

promisor.acceptFromServerUrl — a glob pattern to specify which server-advertised URLs a client is allowed to act on 🌈. When a URL matches, the client will accept the advertised remote as a promisor remote, may automatically create a new remote configuration for it and may automatically accept field updates (such as authentication tokens) from the server — even if promisor.acceptFromServer is set to none (the default) 👀.

This option can appear multiple times in config files ✨. An advertised URL will be accepted if it matches ANY glob pattern specified by this option in ANY config file read by Git.

When both promisor.acceptFromServer and promisor.acceptFromServerUrl are set, promisor.acceptFromServerUrl is consulted first and takes precedence: if a matching pattern leads to acceptance (either by auto-configuring an unknown remote or by accepting field updates for a known remote whose URL matches both the local configuration and the allowlist), the advertised remote is accepted regardless of the promisor.acceptFromServer setting 🫶. If no pattern in promisor.acceptFromServerUrl triggers acceptance, the decision is left to promisor.acceptFromServer.

But note: even when an advertised URL matches a pattern in promisor.acceptFromServerUrl, an already-existing remote on the client whose name matches the advertised name but whose configured URL differs from the advertised one will NOT be accepted through promisor.acceptFromServerUrl 🚫. This prevents a server from silently re-pointing an existing client-side remote at a different URL. (Such a remote may still be accepted through promisor.acceptFromServer=all or =knownName, which have their own, looser semantics; see the documentation of that option.)

Be VERY careful with these patterns 😭: * matches any sequence of characters within the host and path parts of a URL (but cannot cross part boundaries). An overly broad pattern is a major security risk, as a matching URL allows a server to auto-configure new remotes and to update fields (such as authentication tokens) on known remotes without further confirmation 💀💀💀. To minimize security risks, follow these guidelines:

Start with a secure protocol scheme, like https:// or ssh:// 🔐.
Only allow domain names or paths where you control and trust ALL the content. Be especially careful with shared hosting platforms like github.com or gitlab.com ⚠️. A broad pattern like https://gitlab.com/* is dangerous because it trusts every single repository on the entire platform. Always restrict such patterns to your specific organization or namespace (e.g., https://gitlab.com/your-org/*) 💅.

Never put globs at the end of a domain name, bestie. Like https://cdn.your-org.com/* is probably fine, but https://cdn.your-org.com*/* is a major security risk because that second one straight-up matches https://cdn.your-org.com.hacker.net/repo. 💀
Be careful with globs at the beginning of domain names too. The code does make sure a * in the host can't cross over into the path, but a pattern like https://*.example.com/* will still match any subdomain. That's extremely dangerous on shared hosting platforms (e.g. https://*.github.io/* ends up trusting every single user's site on the whole platform 🙈).

Before matching happens, both the advertised URL and the pattern get normalized: the scheme and host are lowercased, percent-encoded characters are decoded where possible, and path segments like .. are resolved. The port has to match exactly too (so https://example.com:8080/* will not match a URL advertised on port 9999). The username and password components of the URL are ignored during matching. Btw, embedding credentials in URLs is discouraged — passing authentication tokens via the token field of the promisor-remote capability is strongly preferred. 🫶

The glob pattern can optionally be prefixed with a remote name and an equals sign (e.g. cdn=https://cdn.example.com/*). If you do give it a prefix, the accepted remotes get saved under that name. If you don't, a safe remote name is automatically generated by sanitizing the URL and prefixing it with promisor-auto-.

If a remote with the chosen name already exists but points to a different URL, Git will append a numeric suffix (e.g. -1, -2) to the name so it doesn't overwrite your existing configs. You should make sure that doesn't happen often though, because remotes get rejected if the numeric suffix increases too much. In all cases, the original name advertised by the server is recorded in the remote.<name>.advertisedAs configuration variable, for tracing and debugging purposes. 👑

For the security implications of accepting a promisor remote, see the documentation of promisor.acceptFromServer. For details on the protocol, see gitprotocol-v2(5).

promisor.checkFields — a comma or space separated list of extra remote-related field names. A client checks whether the values of these fields transmitted by a server correspond to the values of these fields in its own configuration before accepting a promisor remote. Currently, "partialCloneFilter" and "token" are the only supported field names. ✨

If one of these field names (e.g. "token") is being checked for an advertised promisor remote (e.g. "foo"), three conditions must be met for the check of this specific field to pass:

The corresponding local configuration (e.g. remote.foo.token) must be set.
The server must advertise the "token" field for remote "foo".
The value of the locally configured remote.foo.token must exactly match the value advertised by the server for the "token" field.

If any of these conditions isn't met for any field name listed in promisor.checkFields, the advertised remote "foo" is rejected. 🚫

For the "partialCloneFilter" field, this lets the client make sure the server's filter matches what it expects locally, preventing inconsistencies in filtering behavior. For the "token" field, this can be used to verify that authentication credentials match expected values.

Field values are compared case-sensitively. 🔍

The "name" and "url" fields are always checked according to the promisor.acceptFromServer policy, independently of this setting.

The field names and values should be passed by the server through the "promisor-remote" capability by using the promisor.sendFields config variable. Fields are checked only if the promisor.acceptFromServer config variable is not set to "None". If set to "None", this config variable has no effect. See gitprotocol-v2(5).

promisor.storeFields — a comma or space separated list of extra remote-related field names. If a client accepts an advertised remote, the client will store the values associated with these field names (taken from the remote advertisement) into its configuration, and then reload its remote configuration. Currently, "partialCloneFilter" and "token" are the only supported field names. 🎀

For example, if a server advertises "partialCloneFilter=blob:limit=20k" for remote "foo", and that remote is accepted, then "blob:limit=20k" will be stored for the "remote.foo.partialCloneFilter" configuration variable.

If the new field value from an advertised remote is the same as the existing field value for that remote on the client side, then no change is made to the client configuration though.

When a new value is stored, a message is printed to standard error so users know about it. 📢

Note that for security reasons, if the remote isn't already configured on the client side, nothing will be stored for that remote. In any case, no new remote will be created and no URL will be stored. 🙅‍♀️

Before storing a partial clone filter, it's parsed to check it's valid. If it's not, a warning is emitted and it's not stored.

Before storing a token, a check is performed to make sure it contains no control character. If the check fails, a warning is emitted and it's not stored.

protocol.allow — if set, gives a user defined default policy for all protocols that don't explicitly have a policy (protocol.<name>.allow). By default, if unset, known-safe protocols (http, https, git, ssh) have a default policy of always, known-dangerous protocols (ext) have a default policy of never, and all other protocols (including file) have a default policy of user. Supported policies: 🌈
- always — protocol is always able to be used. ✅
- never — protocol is never able to be used. ❌
- user — protocol is only able to be used when GIT_PROTOCOL_FROM_USER is either unset or has a value of 1. This policy should be used when you want a protocol to be directly usable by the user but don't want it used by commands which execute clone/fetch/push commands without user input, e.g. recursive submodule initialization.
protocol.<name>.allow — sets a policy to be used by protocol <name> with clone/fetch/push commands. See protocol.allow above for the available policies.

The protocol names currently used by git are:

file: any local file-based path (including file:// URLs, or local paths)
git: the anonymous git protocol over a direct TCP connection (or proxy, if configured)
ssh: git over ssh (including host:path syntax, ssh://, etc).
http: git over http, both "smart http" and "dumb http". Note that this does not include https; if you want to configure both, you must do so individually. 🫠
any external helpers are named by their protocol (e.g., use hg to allow the git-remote-hg helper)

protocol.version — if set, clients will attempt to communicate with a server using the specified protocol version. If the server doesn't support it, communication falls back to version 0. If unset, the default is 2. Supported versions: 🦋
- 0 — the original wire protocol.
- 1 — the original wire protocol with the addition of a version string in the initial response from the server.
- 2 — Wire protocol version 2, see gitprotocol-v2(5).
pull.ff — by default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that is a descendant of the current commit. Instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded. When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line). When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line). This setting overrides merge.ff when pulling. ⭐
pull.rebase — when true, rebase branches on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when git pull is run. See "branch.<name>.rebase" for setting this on a per-branch basis. 🧚

When merges (or just m), pass the --rebase-merges option to git rebase so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see git-rebase(1) for details).

When the value is interactive (or just i), the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see git-rebase(1) for details). 😭

pull.octopus — the default merge strategy to use when pulling multiple branches at once.
pull.autoStash — when set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry to record the local changes before the operation begins, and restore them after the operation completes. When your git pull rebases (instead of merges), this may be convenient, since unlike merging pull that tolerates local changes that don't interfere with the merge, rebasing pull refuses to work with any local changes. 💅

If pull.autostash is set (either to true or false), merge.autostash and rebase.autostash are ignored. If pull.autostash is not set at all, depending on the value of pull.rebase, merge.autostash or rebase.autostash is used instead. Can be overridden by the --[no-]autostash command line option.

pull.twohead — the default merge strategy to use when pulling a single branch.
push.autoSetupRemote — if set to true, assume --set-upstream on default push when no upstream tracking exists for the current branch; this option takes effect with push.default options simple, upstream, and current. It's useful if by default you want new branches pushed to the default remote (like the behavior of push.default=current) and you also want the upstream tracking to be set. Workflows most likely to benefit from this option are simple central workflows where all branches are expected to have the same name on the remote. 🔥

`push.default`

Bestie, this one decides what git push actually does when you don't hand it a refspec — like, no refspec from the command line, from config, from anywhere. Different values are built for different workflows; for example, in a purely central workflow (where the fetch source equals the push destination ngl) upstream is probably what you want. Possible values are:

nothing — literally do not push anything (error out) unless a refspec is given. This is primarily meant for people who want to avoid mistakes by always being explicit. Respect the paranoia honestly 💅
current — push the current branch to update a branch with the same name on the receiving end. Works in both central and non-central workflows, versatile queen.
upstream — push the current branch back to the branch whose changes are usually integrated into the current branch (which is called @{upstream}). This mode only makes sense if you're pushing to the same repository you'd normally pull from (i.e. central workflow).
tracking — this is a deprecated synonym for upstream. She's old, she's tired 💀
simple — push the current branch with the same name on the remote.
- This mode requires that the remote repository to be pushed to is known. When pushing back to the same remote you pull from, the current branch must also have an upstream tracking branch with the same name.
- This mode is the default since Git 2.0, and is the safest option suited for beginners. Beginner-friendly icon ✨
matching — push all branches having the same name on both ends. This makes the repository you're pushing to remember the set of branches that will be pushed out (e.g. if you always push maint and master there and no other branches, the repository you push to will have these two branches, and your local maint and master will be pushed there).
- To use this mode effectively, you have to make sure all the branches you would push out are ready to be pushed out before running git push, because the whole point of this mode is to allow you to push all of the branches in one go. If you usually finish work on only one branch and push out the result while other branches are unfinished, this mode is not for you 🙈
- Also this mode is not suitable for pushing into a shared central repository, since other people may add new branches there, or update the tip of existing branches outside your control.
- This used to be the default, but not since Git 2.0 (simple is the new default).

`push.followTags`

If set to true, enable the --follow-tags option by default. You may override this configuration at time of push by specifying --no-follow-tags. Override whenever, no drama 🫶

`push.gpgSign`

May be set to a boolean value, or the string if-asked. A true value causes all pushes to be GPG signed, as if --signed is passed to git-push(1). The string if-asked causes pushes to be signed if the server supports it, as if --signed=if-asked is passed to git push. A false value may override a value from a lower-priority config file. An explicit command-line flag always overrides this config option — command line stays main character 👑

`push.pushOption`

When no --push-option=<option> argument is given from the command line, git push behaves as if each <option> of this variable is given as --push-option=<option>.

This is a multi-valued variable, and an empty value can be used in a higher priority configuration file (e.g. .git/config in a repository) to clear the values inherited from lower priority configuration files (e.g. $HOME/.gitconfig).

Example:

/etc/gitconfig
  push.pushoption = a
  push.pushoption = b

~/.gitconfig
  push.pushoption = c

repo/.git/config
  push.pushoption =
  push.pushoption = b

This will result in only b (a and c are cleared). Clean slate energy ✨

`push.recurseSubmodules`

May be check, on-demand, only, or no, with the same behavior as that of push --recurse-submodules. If not set, no is used by default, unless submodule.recurse is set (in which case a true value means on-demand).

`push.useForceIfIncludes`

If set to true, it is equivalent to specifying --force-if-includes as an option to git-push(1) in the command line. Adding --no-force-if-includes at the time of push overrides this configuration setting.

`push.negotiate`

If set to true, attempt to reduce the size of the packfile sent by rounds of negotiation in which the client and the server attempt to find commits in common. If false, Git will rely solely on the server's ref advertisement to find commits in common.

`push.useBitmaps`

If set to false, disable use of bitmaps for git push even if pack.useBitmaps is true, without preventing other git operations from using bitmaps. Default is true.

`rebase.backend`

Default backend to use for rebasing. Possible choices are apply or merge. In the future, if the merge backend gains all remaining capabilities of the apply backend, this setting may become unused. Future tea 🍵

`rebase.stat`

Whether to show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. False by default.

`rebase.autoSquash`

If set to true, enable the --autosquash option of git-rebase(1) by default for interactive mode. This can be overridden with the --no-autosquash option.

`rebase.autoStash`

When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful rebase might result in non-trivial conflicts 😭 This option can be overridden by the --no-autostash and --autostash options of git-rebase(1). Defaults to false.

`rebase.updateRefs`

If set to true enable --update-refs option by default.

`rebase.missingCommitsCheck`

If set to "warn", git rebase -i will print a warning if some commits are removed (e.g. a line was deleted), however the rebase will still proceed. If set to "error", it will print the previous warning and stop the rebase; git rebase --edit-todo can then be used to correct the error. If set to "ignore", no checking is done. To drop a commit without warning or error, use the drop command in the todo list. Defaults to "ignore".

`rebase.instructionFormat`

A format string, as specified in git-log(1), to be used for the todo list during an interactive rebase. The format will automatically have the commit hash prepended to the format.

`rebase.abbreviateCommands`

If set to true, git rebase will use abbreviated command names in the todo list resulting in something like this:

p deadbee The oneline of the commit
p fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
...

instead of:

pick deadbee The oneline of the commit
pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
...

Defaults to false. Short and sweet, lowkey efficient 🎀

`rebase.rescheduleFailedExec`

Automatically reschedule exec commands that failed. This only makes sense in interactive mode (or when an --exec option was provided). This is the same as specifying the --reschedule-failed-exec option.

`rebase.forkPoint`

If set to false set --no-fork-point option by default.

`rebase.rebaseMerges`

Whether and how to set the --rebase-merges option by default. Can be rebase-cousins, no-rebase-cousins, or a boolean. Setting to true or to no-rebase-cousins is equivalent to --rebase-merges=no-rebase-cousins, setting to rebase-cousins is equivalent to --rebase-merges=rebase-cousins, and setting to false is equivalent to --no-rebase-merges. Passing --rebase-merges on the command line, with or without an argument, overrides any rebase.rebaseMerges configuration.

`rebase.maxLabelLength`

When generating label names from commit subjects, truncate the names to this length. By default, the names are truncated to a little less than NAME_MAX (to allow e.g. .lock files to be written for the corresponding loose refs).

`receive.advertiseAtomic`

By default, git-receive-pack will advertise the atomic push capability to its clients. If you don't want to advertise this capability, set this variable to false.

`receive.advertisePushOptions`

When set to true, git-receive-pack will advertise the push options capability to its clients. False by default.

`receive.autogc`

By default, git-receive-pack will run "git maintenance run --auto" after receiving data from git-push and updating refs. You can stop it by setting this variable to false.

`receive.certNonceSeed`

By setting this variable to a string, git receive-pack will accept a git push --signed and verify it by using a "nonce" protected by HMAC using this string as a secret key. Secret key behaviour 🔥

`receive.certNonceSlop`

When a git push --signed sends a push certificate with a "nonce" that was issued by a receive-pack serving the same repository within this many seconds, export the "nonce" found in the certificate to GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE to the hooks (instead of what the receive-pack asked the sending side to include). This may allow writing checks in pre-receive and post-receive a bit easier. Instead of checking GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_SLOP environment variable that records by how many seconds the nonce is stale to decide if they want to accept the certificate, they only can check GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_STATUS is OK.

`receive.fsckObjects`

If it is set to true, git-receive-pack will check all received objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what's checked. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.

`receive.fsck.<msg-id>`

Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by git-receive-pack(1) instead of git-fsck(1). See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.

`receive.fsck.skipList`

Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by git-receive-pack(1) instead of git-fsck(1). See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.

Okay bestie, this next lil cluster is all about the receive side of push, the reftable backend, and the remote config glow-up. It's giving server-side details, but make it cute. 💅

💖 `receive.keepAlive`

After the pack from the client arrives, receive-pack may produce no output (if --quiet was specified) while it processes the pack, and some networks will straight-up drop the TCP connection because of the silence. With this option set, if receive-pack does not transmit any data in this phase for receive.keepAlive seconds, it will send a short keepalive packet. The default is 5 seconds; set to 0 to disable keepalives entirely.

🎀 `receive.unpackLimit`

If the number of objects received in a push is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit, then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

✨ `receive.maxInputSize`

If the size of the incoming pack stream is larger than this limit, then git-receive-pack will error out, instead of accepting the pack file. If not set or set to 0, then the size is unlimited.

🦋 `receive.denyDeletes`

If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update that deletes the ref. Use this to prevent such a ref deletion via a push.

🌸 `receive.denyDeleteCurrent`

If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update that deletes the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository.

💀 `receive.denyCurrentBranch`

If set to true or "refuse", git-receive-pack will deny a ref update to the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository. Such a push is potentially dangerous because it brings the HEAD out of sync with the index and working tree. If set to "warn", print a warning of such a push to stderr, but allow the push to proceed. If set to false or "ignore", allow such pushes with no message. Defaults to "refuse".

Another option is "updateInstead" which will update the working tree if pushing into the current branch. This option is intended for synchronizing working directories when one side is not easily accessible via interactive ssh (e.g. a live web site, hence the requirement that the working directory be clean). This mode also comes in handy when developing inside a VM to test and fix code on different Operating Systems.

By default, "updateInstead" will refuse the push if the working tree or the index have any difference from the HEAD, but the push-to-checkout hook can be used to customize this. See githooks(5).

🔥 `receive.denyNonFastForwards`

If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update which is not a fast-forward. Use this to prevent such an update via a push, even if that push is forced. This configuration variable is set when initializing a shared repository.

🧚 `receive.hideRefs`

This variable is the same as transfer.hideRefs, but applies only to receive-pack (and so affects pushes, but not fetches). An attempt to update or delete a hidden ref by git push is rejected.

👑 `receive.procReceiveRefs`

This is a multi-valued variable that defines reference prefixes to match the commands in receive-pack. Commands matching the prefixes will be executed by an external hook "proc-receive", instead of the internal execute_commands function. If this variable is not defined, the "proc-receive" hook will never be used, and all commands will be executed by the internal execute_commands function.

For example, if this variable is set to "refs/for", pushing to reference such as "refs/for/master" will not create or update a reference named "refs/for/master", but may create or update a pull request directly by running the hook "proc-receive".

Optional modifiers can be provided in the beginning of the value to filter commands for specific actions: create (a), modify (m), delete (d). A ! can be included in the modifiers to negate the reference prefix entry. E.g.:

git config --system --add receive.procReceiveRefs ad:refs/heads
git config --system --add receive.procReceiveRefs !:refs/heads

💜 `receive.updateServerInfo`

If set to true, git-receive-pack will run git-update-server-info after receiving data from git-push and updating refs.

🌈 `receive.shallowUpdate`

If set to true, .git/shallow can be updated when new refs require new shallow roots. Otherwise those refs are rejected.

🍓 `reftable.blockSize`

The size in bytes used by the reftable backend when writing blocks. The block size is determined by the writer, and does not have to be a power of 2. The block size must be larger than the longest reference name or log entry used in the repository, as references cannot span blocks.

Powers of two that are friendly to the virtual memory system or filesystem (such as 4kB or 8kB) are recommended. Larger sizes (64kB) can yield better compression, with a possible increased cost incurred by readers during access.

The largest block size is 16777215 bytes (15.99 MiB). The default value is 4096 bytes (4kB). A value of 0 will use the default value.

🫶 `reftable.restartInterval`

The interval at which to create restart points. The reftable backend determines the restart points at file creation. Every 16 may be more suitable for smaller block sizes (4k or 8k), every 64 for larger block sizes (64k).

More frequent restart points reduces prefix compression and increases space consumed by the restart table, both of which increase file size.

Less frequent restart points makes prefix compression more effective, decreasing overall file size, with increased penalties for readers walking through more records after the binary search step.

A maximum of 65535 restart points per block is supported.

The default value is to create restart points every 16 records. A value of 0 will use the default value.

⭐ `reftable.indexObjects`

Whether the reftable backend shall write object blocks. Object blocks are a reverse mapping of object ID to the references pointing to them.

The default value is true.

🦋 `reftable.geometricFactor`

Whenever the reftable backend appends a new table to the stack, it performs auto compaction to ensure that there is only a handful of tables. The backend does this by ensuring that tables form a geometric sequence regarding the respective sizes of each table.

By default, the geometric sequence uses a factor of 2, meaning that for any table, the next-biggest table must at least be twice as big. A maximum factor of 256 is supported.

🌸 `reftable.lockTimeout`

Whenever the reftable backend appends a new table to the stack, it has to lock the central "tables.list" file before updating it. This config controls how long the process will wait to acquire the lock in case another process has already acquired it. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 100 (i.e., retry for 100ms).

💖 `remote.pushDefault`

The remote to push to by default. Overrides branch.<name>.remote for all branches, and is overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote for specific branches.

🎀 `remote.<name>.url`

The URL of a remote repository. See git-fetch(1) or git-push(1). A configured remote can have multiple URLs; in this case the first is used for fetching, and all are used for pushing (assuming no remote.<name>.pushurl is defined). Setting this key to the empty string clears the list of urls, allowing you to override earlier config.

✨ `remote.<name>.pushurl`

The push URL of a remote repository. See git-push(1). If a pushurl option is present in a configured remote, it is used for pushing instead of remote.<name>.url. A configured remote can have multiple push URLs; in this case a push goes to all of them. Setting this key to the empty string clears the list of urls, allowing you to override earlier config.

🦋 `remote.<name>.proxy`

For remotes that require curl (http, https and ftp), the URL to the proxy to use for that remote. Set to the empty string to disable proxying for that remote.

🌸 `remote.<name>.proxyAuthMethod`

For remotes that require curl (http, https and ftp), the method to use for authenticating against the proxy in use (probably set in remote.<name>.proxy). See http.proxyAuthMethod.

💅 `remote.<name>.fetch`

The default set of "refspec" for git-fetch(1). See git-fetch(1).

🔥 `remote.<name>.push`

The default set of "refspec" for git-push(1). See git-push(1).

👑 `remote.<name>.mirror`

If true, pushing to this remote will automatically behave as if the --mirror option was given on the command line.

🧚 `remote.<name>.skipDefaultUpdate`

A deprecated synonym to remote.<name>.skipFetchAll (if both are set in the configuration files with different values, the value of the last occurrence will be used).

💜 `remote.<name>.skipFetchAll`

If true, this remote will be skipped when updating using git-fetch(1), the update subcommand of git-remote(1), and ignored by the prefetch task of git maintenance.

🌈 `remote.<name>.receivepack`

The default program to execute on the remote side when pushing. See option --receive-pack of git-push(1).

🍓 `remote.<name>.uploadpack`

The default program to execute on the remote side when fetching. See option --upload-pack of git-fetch-pack(1).

⭐ `remote.<name>.tagOpt`

Setting this value to --no-tags disables automatic tag following when fetching from remote <name>. Setting it to --tags will fetch every tag from remote <name>, even if they are not reachable from remote branch heads. Passing these flags directly to git-fetch(1) can override this setting. See options --tags and --no-tags of git-fetch(1).

🫶 `remote.<name>.vcs`

Setting this to a value <vcs> will cause Git to interact with the remote with the git-remote-<vcs> helper.

💖 `remote.<name>.prune`

When set to true, fetching from this remote by default will also remove any remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote (as if the --prune option was given on the command line). Overrides fetch.prune settings, if any.

🎀 `remote.<name>.pruneTags`

When set to true, fetching from this remote by default will also remove any local tags that no longer exist on the remote if pruning is activated in general via remote.<name>.prune, fetch.prune or --prune. Overrides fetch.pruneTags settings, if any.

See also remote.<name>.prune and the PRUNING section of git-fetch(1). 🦋

remote.<name>.promisor — set this to true and this remote gets to be the one that fetches your promisor objects. That's its whole job, bestie 💅
remote.<name>.advertisedAs — okay so when a promisor remote gets auto-configured using info a server advertised through the promisor-remote protocol capability (peep promisor.acceptFromServerUrl), the name the server originally advertised gets stashed in this variable. It's for information, tracing and debugging purposes only, so like... look but don't touch 🙈 users shouldn't typically be modifying or creating these config entries.
remote.<name>.partialclonefilter — the filter that gets applied when fetching from this promisor remote. Changing it or clearing it only affects fetches for new commits, so if you wanna grab the associated objects for commits that are already chilling in your local object database, use the --refetch option of git-fetch(1). no cap ✨
remote.<name>.serverOption — the default set of server options used when fetching from this remote. These can be overridden by the --server-option= command line arguments, so the CLI is always the main character 👑

It's a multi-valued variable, and an empty value is allowed in a higher priority configuration file (e.g. .git/config in a repository) to clear out the values inherited from lower priority configuration files (e.g. $HOME/.gitconfig). reset era 💀

remote.<name>.negotiationRestrict — when negotiating with this remote during git fetch, this restricts the commits advertised as "have" lines to only those reachable from refs matching the given patterns. Multi-valued, and it behaves exactly like --negotiation-restrict on the command line.

Each value is either an exact ref name (e.g. refs/heads/release) or a glob pattern (e.g. refs/heads/release/*). The pattern syntax is the same as for --negotiation-restrict.

These config values are used as defaults for the --negotiation-restrict command-line option — so if --negotiation-restrict (or its synonym --negotiation-tip) is specified on the command line, the config values are not used. periodt 💅

These values also influence negotiation during git push if push.negotiate is enabled.

Blank values signal to ignore all previous values, which lets you reset the list from broader config scenarios. so iconic 🌸

remote.<name>.negotiationInclude — when negotiating with this remote during git fetch, the client advertises a list of commits that exist locally. In repos with many references, that list of "haves" can get truncated, and depending on the data shape, dropping certain references may be expensive 😭 This multi-valued config option specifies references, commit hashes, or ref pattern globs whose tips should always be sent as "have" commits during fetch negotiation with this remote.

Each value is either an exact ref name (e.g. refs/heads/release), a commit hash, or a glob pattern (e.g. refs/heads/release/*). The pattern syntax is the same as for --negotiation-include.

These config values are used as defaults for the --negotiation-include command-line option. If --negotiation-include is specified on the command line, then the config values are not used.

This option is additive with the normal negotiation process: the negotiation algorithm still runs and advertises its own selected commits, but the refs matching remote.<name>.negotiationInclude are sent unconditionally on top of those heuristically selected commits. like, extra on purpose 💖

These values also influence negotiation during git push if push.negotiate is enabled.

Blank values signal to ignore all previous values, allowing a reset of the list from broader config scenarios. 🎀

remote.<name>.followRemoteHEAD — when fetching this remote using its default refspec, this setting decides how to handle differences between the remote's HEAD and the local remotes/<name>/HEAD symbolic-ref. It overrides the value of fetch.followRemoteHEAD — see fetch.followRemoteHEAD for a description of the accepted values.

On top of the values supported by fetch.followRemoteHEAD, this setting may also take on the value "warn-if-not-$branch", which behaves like "warn", but ignores the warning if the remote's HEAD is remotes/<name>/$branch. picky but polite 🧚

remotes.<group> — the list of remotes that get fetched by git remote update <group>. See git-remote(1). 🫶
repack.useDeltaBaseOffset — by default, git-repack(1) creates packs that use delta-base offset. If you need to share your repository with Git older than version 1.4.4 — either directly or via a dumb protocol such as http — then you need to set this option to "false" and repack. Access from old Git versions over the native protocol is unaffected by this option, so no stress there 💅
repack.packKeptObjects — if set to true, makes git repack act as if --pack-kept-objects was passed. See git-repack(1) for details. Defaults to false normally, but true if a bitmap index is being written (either via --write-bitmap-index or repack.writeBitmaps). ⭐
repack.useDeltaIslands — if set to true, makes git repack act as if --delta-islands was passed. Defaults to false. 🌈
repack.writeBitmaps — when true, git will write a bitmap index when packing all objects to disk (e.g., when git repack -a is run). This index can speed up the "counting objects" phase of subsequent packs created for clones and fetches, at the cost of some disk space and extra time spent on the initial repack. It has no effect if multiple packfiles are created. Defaults to true on bare repos, false otherwise. trade-offs, bestie 😌
repack.updateServerInfo — if set to false, git-repack(1) will not run git-update-server-info(1). Defaults to true. Can be overridden when true by the -n option of git-repack(1).
repack.cruftWindow, repack.cruftWindowMemory, repack.cruftDepth, repack.cruftThreads — parameters used by git-pack-objects(1) when generating a cruft pack, used whenever the respective parameters are not given over the command line. See the similarly named pack.* configuration variables for defaults and meaning. 💀
repack.midxMustContainCruft — when set to true, git-repack(1) will unconditionally include cruft pack(s), if any, in the multi-pack index when invoked with --write-midx. When false, cruft packs are only included in the MIDX when necessary (e.g., because they might be required to form a reachability closure with MIDX bitmaps). Defaults to true. 👑
repack.midxSplitFactor — the factor used in the geometric merging condition when compacting incremental MIDX layers during git repack when invoked with the --write-midx=incremental option.

Adjacent layers are merged when the accumulated object count of the newer layer exceeds 1/<N> of the object count of the next deeper layer. Must be at least 2. Defaults to 2. math girlie hours 🧮✨

repack.midxNewLayerThreshold — the minimum number of packs in the tip MIDX layer before those packs are considered as candidates for geometric repacking during git repack --write-midx=incremental.

When the tip layer has fewer packs than this threshold, those packs are excluded from the geometric repack entirely, and are thus left unmodified. Must be at least 1. Defaults to 8. 🍓

replay.refAction — specifies the default mode for handling reference updates. The value can be:
- update — (default) update refs directly using an atomic transaction. 💅
- print — output update-ref commands for pipeline use. 🎀

See --ref-action in git-replay(1) for details.

rerere.autoUpdate — when set to true, git-rerere updates the index with the resulting contents after it cleanly resolves conflicts using previously recorded resolutions. Defaults to false. she remembers so you don't have to 😭💖
rerere.enabled — activates recording of resolved conflicts, so that identical conflict hunks can be resolved automatically should they ever be encountered again. By default, git-rerere(1) is enabled if there's an rr-cache directory under the $GIT_DIR — e.g. if "rerere" was previously used in the repository. iconic behaviour fr fr 👑
revert.reference — setting this variable to true makes git revert behave as if the --reference option is given. 🌸
safe.bareRepository — specifies which bare repositories Git will work with. The currently supported values are:
- all: Git works with all bare repositories. This is the default in Git 2.x.
- explicit: Git only works with bare repositories specified via the top-level --git-dir command-line option, or the GIT_DIR environment variable (see git(1)). This will be the default in Git 3.0. 🔥

If you don't use bare repositories in your workflow, then it may be beneficial to set safe.bareRepository to explicit in your global config. This protects you from attacks that involve cloning a repository that contains a bare repository and running a Git command within that directory. 🛡️✨

If you do use bare repositories regularly and want to preserve the current behavior after upgrading to Git 3.0, set safe.bareRepository to all in your global or system config.

heads up bestie: this config setting is only respected in protected configuration (see the section called "SCOPES"). This prevents untrusted repositories from tampering with this value. don't skip this one 💀

safe.directory — these config entries specify Git-tracked directories that are considered safe even if they're owned by someone other than the current user. By default, Git will refuse to even parse a Git config of a repository owned by someone else, let alone run its hooks — and this config setting lets users specify exceptions, e.g. for intentionally shared repositories (see the --shared option in git-init(1)). 😤

It's a multi-valued setting, i.e. you can add more than one directory via git config --add. To reset the list of safe directories (e.g. to override any such directories specified in the system config), add a safe.directory entry with an empty value. clean slate energy 🫧

again: this config setting is only respected in protected configuration (see the section called "SCOPES"). This prevents untrusted repositories from tampering with this value. 🙈

The value of this setting is interpolated, i.e. ~/<path> expands to a path relative to the home directory and %(prefix)/<path> expands to a path relative to Git's (runtime) prefix. 🧚💜

To completely opt out of this security check, set safe.directory to the string *. That's it, that's the whole vibe — every repo gets treated as if its directory was chill and listed in the safe.directory list. ✨ But heads up, bestie: if safe.directory=* is set in system config and you actually want to re-enable this protection, then initialize your list with an empty value before listing the repositories that you deem safe. And giving a directory with /* appended to it will allow access to all repositories under the named directory. 💅

So, as explained, Git only allows you to access repositories owned by yourself, i.e. the user who is running Git, by default. No cap. But: when Git is running as root in a non Windows platform that provides sudo, git checks the SUDO_UID environment variable that sudo creates and will allow access to the uid recorded as its value in addition to the id from root. Why? Because it makes it easy to perform a common sequence during installation "make && sudo make install". 🎀 A git process running under sudo runs as root but the sudo command exports the environment variable to record which id the original user has. If that is not what you would prefer and you want git to only trust repositories that are owned by root instead, then you can remove the SUDO_UID variable from root's environment before invoking git. 🙈

💌 CONFIGURATION FILE (still going, we're so back)

`sendemail.identity`

A configuration identity. When given, causes values in the sendemail.<identity> subsection to take precedence over values in the sendemail section. The default identity is the value of sendemail.identity. 👑

`sendemail.smtpEncryption`

See git-send-email(1) for description. Note that this setting is not subject to the identity mechanism. (iconic of it, honestly)

`sendemail.smtpSSLCertPath`

Path to ca-certificates (either a directory or a single file). Set it to an empty string to disable certificate verification. 🦋

`sendemail.smtpSSLClientCert`

Path to the client certificate file to present if requested by the server. This is required when the server is set up to verify client certificates. If the corresponding private key is not included in the file, it must be supplied using sendemail.smtpSSLClientKey or the --smtp-ssl-client-key option.

`sendemail.smtpSSLClientKey`

Path to the client private key file that corresponds to the client certificate. To avoid misconfiguration, this configuration must be used in conjunction with sendemail.smtpSSLClientCert or the --smtp-ssl-client-cert option. If the client key is included in the client certificate, the choice of private key depends on the format of the certificate. Visit https://metacpan.org/pod/IO::Socket::SSL for more details. 🔥

`sendemail.<identity>.<config>`

Identity-specific versions of the sendemail.<config> parameters found below, taking precedence over those when this identity is selected, through either the command-line or sendemail.identity. It's giving layered outfits, but for config. 💅

`sendemail.multiEdit`

If true (default), a single editor instance will be spawned to edit files you have to edit (patches when --annotate is used, and the summary when --compose is used). If false, files will be edited one after the other, spawning a new editor each time. 😭 (chaotic but valid)

`sendemail.confirm`

Sets the default for whether to confirm before sending. Must be one of always, never, cc, compose, or auto. See --confirm in the git-send-email(1) documentation for the meaning of these values. ⭐

`sendemail.mailmap`

If true, makes git-send-email(1) assume --mailmap, otherwise assume --no-mailmap. False by default. 🎀

`sendemail.mailmap.file`

The location of a git-send-email(1) specific augmenting mailmap file. The default mailmap and mailmap.file are loaded first. Thus, entries in this file take precedence over entries in the default mailmap locations. See gitmailmap(5). 👑

`sendemail.mailmap.blob`

Like sendemail.mailmap.file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. Entries in sendemail.mailmap.file take precedence over entries here. See gitmailmap(5).

`sendemail.aliasesFile`

To avoid typing long email addresses, point this to one or more email aliases files. You must also supply sendemail.aliasFileType. (both of them, bestie, it's a package deal 🫶)

`sendemail.aliasFileType`

Format of the file(s) specified in sendemail.aliasesFile. Must be one of mutt, mailrc, pine, elm, gnus, or sendmail.

What an alias file in each format looks like can be found in the documentation of the email program of the same name. The differences and limitations from the standard formats are described below:

sendmail

Quoted aliases and quoted addresses are not supported: lines that contain a " symbol are ignored. 💀
Redirection to a file (/path/name) or pipe (|command) is not supported.
File inclusion (:include: /path/name) is not supported.
Warnings are printed on the standard error output for any explicitly unsupported constructs, and any other lines that are not recognized by the parser.

`sendemail.annotate`, `sendemail.bcc`, `sendemail.cc`, `sendemail.ccCmd`, `sendemail.chainReplyTo`, `sendemail.envelopeSender`, `sendemail.from`, `sendemail.headerCmd`, `sendemail.signedOffByCc`, `sendemail.smtpPass`, `sendemail.suppressCc`, `sendemail.suppressFrom`, `sendemail.to`, `sendemail.toCmd`, `sendemail.smtpDomain`, `sendemail.smtpServer`, `sendemail.smtpServerPort`, `sendemail.smtpServerOption`, `sendemail.smtpUser`, `sendemail.imapSentFolder`, `sendemail.useImapOnly`, `sendemail.thread`, `sendemail.transferEncoding`, `sendemail.validate`, `sendemail.xmailer`

These configuration variables all provide a default for git-send-email(1) command-line options. See its documentation for details. Yes, all of them. One giant squad. 🌈

`sendemail.outlookidfix`

If true, makes git-send-email(1) assume --outlook-id-fix, and if false assume --no-outlook-id-fix. If not specified, it will behave the same way as if --outlook-id-fix is not specified. 🦋

`sendemail.signedOffCc` (deprecated)

Deprecated alias for sendemail.signedOffByCc. Bestie it's deprecated, use the other one, I'm begging 😭

`sendemail.smtpBatchSize`

Number of messages to be sent per connection, after that a relogin will happen. If the value is 0 or undefined, send all messages in one connection. See also the --batch-size option of git-send-email(1). 🔥

`sendemail.smtpReloginDelay`

Seconds to wait before reconnecting to the smtp server. See also the --relogin-delay option of git-send-email(1).

`sendemail.forbidSendmailVariables`

To avoid common misconfiguration mistakes, git-send-email(1) will abort with a warning if any configuration options for sendmail exist. Set this variable to bypass the check. 💅

`sequence.editor`

Text editor used by git rebase -i for editing the rebase instruction file. The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. It can be overridden by the GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR environment variable. When not configured, the default commit message editor is used instead. 👑

`showBranch.default`

The default set of branches for git-show-branch(1). See git-show-branch(1). (yes, that's the whole thing, short and slay)

`sideband.allowControlCharacters`

By default, control characters that are delivered via the sideband are masked, except ANSI color sequences. This prevents potentially unwanted ANSI escape sequences from being sent to the terminal. Use this config setting to override this behavior (the value can be a comma-separated list of the following keywords):

color — Allow ANSI color sequences, line feeds and horizontal tabs, but mask all other control characters. This is the default. ✨
cursor — Allow control sequences that move the cursor. This is disabled by default.
erase — Allow control sequences that erase characters. This is disabled by default.
false — Mask all control characters other than line feeds and horizontal tabs.
true — Allow all control characters to be sent to the terminal. ⚠️ (yes all of them, be so serious)

`sideband.<url>.*`

Apply the sideband.* option selectively to specific URLs. The same URL matching logic applies as for http.<url>.* settings. 🎀

`sparse.expectFilesOutsideOfPatterns`

Typically with sparse checkouts, files not matching any sparsity patterns are marked with a SKIP_WORKTREE bit in the index and are missing from the working tree. Accordingly, Git will ordinarily check whether files with the SKIP_WORKTREE bit are in fact present in the working tree contrary to expectations. If Git finds any, it marks those paths as present by clearing the relevant SKIP_WORKTREE bits. This option can be used to tell Git that such present-despite-skipped files are expected and to stop checking for them.

The default is false, which allows Git to automatically recover from the list of files in the index and working tree falling out of sync.

Set this to true if you are in a setup where some external factor relieves Git of the responsibility for maintaining the consistency between the presence of working tree files and sparsity patterns. For example, if you have a Git-aware virtual file system that has a robust mechanism for keeping the working tree and the sparsity patterns up to date based on access patterns. 🦋

Regardless of this setting, Git does not check for present-despite-skipped files unless sparse checkout is enabled, so this config option has no effect unless core.sparseCheckout is true. (read that twice, bestie 🫶)

`splitIndex.maxPercentChange`

When the split index feature is used, this specifies the percent of entries the split index can contain compared to the total number of entries in both the split index and the shared index before a new shared index is written. The value should be between 0 and 100. If the value is 0, then a new shared index is always written; if it is 100, a new shared index is never written. By default, the value is 20, so a new shared index is written if the number of entries in the split index would be greater than 20 percent of the total number of entries. See git-update-index(1). 💖

🌸 `splitIndex.sharedIndexExpire`

ok so when you're using the split index feature, shared index files that haven't been touched since the time this variable says will get yeeted 🗑️ the moment a new shared index file is created. Set it to "now" and literally everything expires immediately (chaotic, love that for you), and "never" means expiration just never happens at all. Default is "2.weeks.ago". Heads up tho — a shared index file counts as modified (for expiration purposes) every single time a new split-index file is created based on it or read from it. See git-update-index(1) 💖

🐚 `ssh.variant`

By default, Git figures out which command line arguments to use based on the basename of the SSH command you configured (that's via the GIT_SSH or GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable, or the core.sshCommand config setting). If that basename is unrecognized, Git goes detective mode 🔍 — it first invokes your configured SSH command with the -G (print configuration) option to try to detect OpenSSH option support, and then uses OpenSSH options if that worked, or no options besides the host and remote command if it failed.

You can override all that detection with ssh.variant. The valid values are ssh (use OpenSSH options), plink, putty, tortoiseplink, and simple (no options except the host and remote command). You can explicitly ask for the default auto-detection with the value auto. Any other value gets treated as ssh. This setting can also be overridden via the environment variable GIT_SSH_VARIANT.

The current command-line parameters used for each variant are:

ssh — [-p port] [-4] [-6] [-o option] [username@]host command
simple — [username@]host command
plink or putty — [-P port] [-4] [-6] [username@]host command
tortoiseplink — [-P port] [-4] [-6] -batch [username@]host command

ngl bestie, except for the simple variant, those command-line parameters are likely to change as git gains new features. lowkey a moving target 🎯

🎀 `stash.index`

If this is true, then git stash apply and git stash pop act like you passed --index. Defaults to false. See the descriptions in git-stash(1).

This also affects invocations of git-stash(1) via --autostash from commands like git-merge(1), git-rebase(1), and git-pull(1). slay, autostash stays winning ✨

🦋 `stash.showIncludeUntracked`

Set this to true and git stash show will show the untracked files of a stash entry. Defaults to false. See the description of the 'show' command in git-stash(1).

🧚 `stash.showPatch`

Set this to true and git stash show without any option will show the stash entry in patch form. Defaults to false. See the description of the 'show' command in git-stash(1).

🍓 `stash.showStat`

Set this to true and git stash show without any option will show a diffstat of the stash entry. Defaults to true. See the description of the 'show' command in git-stash(1).

💅 `status.relativePaths`

By default, git-status(1) shows paths relative to the current directory. Set this variable to false and it shows paths relative to the repository root instead (fun fact: that was the default for Git prior to v1.5.4, vintage 👑).

⭐ `status.short`

Set to true to enable --short by default in git-status(1). The option --no-short takes precedence over this variable.

🌈 `status.branch`

Set to true to enable --branch by default in git-status(1). The option --no-branch takes precedence over this variable.

💜 `status.aheadBehind`

Set to true to enable --ahead-behind and false to enable --no-ahead-behind by default in git-status(1) for non-porcelain status formats. Defaults to true.

🔥 `status.compareBranches`

A space-separated list of branch comparison specifiers to use in git-status(1). Currently only @{upstream} and @{push} are supported. They're interpreted as branch@{upstream} and branch@{push} for the current branch.

If you don't set it, the default behavior is equivalent to @{upstream}, which compares against the configured upstream tracking branch.

The entries show up in the order they appear in the configuration. Duplicate entries that resolve to the same ref get suppressed after their first occurrence, so @{push} @{upstream} @{push} shows at most two comparisons. When @{upstream} and @{push} resolve to the same remote-tracking branch, only one comparison is shown. no dupes, no drama 🙈

Example:

[status]
    compareBranches = @{upstream} @{push}

This would show comparisons against both the configured upstream and push tracking branches for the current branch. iconic.

🎀 `status.displayCommentPrefix`

If set to true, git-status(1) will insert a comment prefix before each output line (starting with core.commentChar, i.e. # by default). This was the behavior of git-status(1) in Git 1.8.4 and previous. Defaults to false.

🌸 `status.renameLimit`

The number of files to consider when performing rename detection in git-status(1) and git-commit(1). Defaults to the value of diff.renameLimit.

✨ `status.renames`

Whether and how Git detects renames in git-status(1) and git-commit(1). If set to "false", rename detection is disabled. If set to "true", basic rename detection is enabled. If set to "copies" or "copy", Git will detect copies as well. Defaults to the value of diff.renames.

💖 `status.showStash`

If set to true, git-status(1) will display the number of entries currently stashed away. Defaults to false.

🫶 `status.showUntrackedFiles`

By default, git-status(1) and git-commit(1) show files that aren't currently tracked by Git. Directories that contain only untracked files are shown with the directory name only. And showing untracked files means Git has to lstat() all the files in the whole repository, which can be slow on some systems 😭. So this variable controls how the commands display the untracked files. Possible values are:

no — show no untracked files.
normal — show untracked files and directories.
all — also show individual files in untracked directories.

If this variable isn't specified, it defaults to normal. All the usual spellings for Boolean true are taken as normal and false as no. This variable can be overridden with the -u|--untracked-files option of git-status(1) and git-commit(1).

🔍 `status.submoduleSummary`

Defaults to false. If you set this to a non-zero number or true (identical to -1 or an unlimited number), the submodule summary gets enabled and a summary of commits for modified submodules will be shown (see the --summary-limit option of git-submodule(1)). Please note that the summary output command will be suppressed for all submodules when diff.ignoreSubmodules is set to all, or only for those submodules where submodule.<name>.ignore=all. The one and only exception to that rule is that status and commit will show staged submodule changes. If you also wanna view the summary for ignored submodules, you can either use the --ignore-submodules=dirty command-line option or the git submodule summary command, which shows similar output but does not honor these settings. iykyk 💀

🧚 `submodule.<name>.url`

The URL for a submodule. This variable gets copied from the .gitmodules file to the git config via git submodule init. You can change the configured URL before obtaining the submodule via git submodule update. If neither submodule.<name>.active nor submodule.active are set, the presence of this variable is used as a fallback to indicate whether the submodule is of interest to git commands. See git-submodule(1) and gitmodules(5) for details.

🌿 `submodule.<name>.update`

The method by which a submodule is updated by git submodule update — which is the only affected command, others such as git checkout --recurse-submodules are unaffected. It exists for historical reasons, back when git submodule was the only command to interact with submodules; settings like submodule.active and pull.rebase are more specific. It's populated by git submodule init from the gitmodules(5) file. See description of update command in git-submodule(1).

🌈 `submodule.<name>.branch`

The remote branch name for a submodule, used by git submodule update --remote. Set this option to override the value found in the .gitmodules file. See git-submodule(1) and gitmodules(5) for details.

🦋 `submodule.<name>.fetchRecurseSubmodules`

This option controls recursive fetching of this particular submodule. It can be overridden by using the --[no-]recurse-submodules command-line option to "git fetch" and "git pull". This setting will override the one from the gitmodules(5) file.

💀 `submodule.<name>.ignore`

Defines under what circumstances "git status" and the diff family show a submodule as modified:

Set it to "all" and it will never consider the submodule modified. It can nevertheless be staged using the option --force, and it will then show up in the output of status.
Set it to "dirty" and it ignores all changes to the submodule's work tree, taking only differences between the HEAD of the submodule and the commit recorded in the superproject into account.
"untracked" will additionally let submodules with modified tracked files in their work tree show up.
Set it to "none" (the default) and it also shows submodules as changed if they have untracked files in their work tree.

This setting overrides any setting made in .gitmodules for this submodule, and both settings can be overridden on the command line by using the "--ignore-submodules" option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting, jsyk.

👑 `submodule.<name>.active`

Boolean value indicating if the submodule is of interest to git commands. This config option takes precedence over the submodule.active config option. See gitsubmodules(7) for details.

🎀 `submodule.<name>.gitdir`

This sets the gitdir path for submodule <name>. This configuration is respected when extensions.submodulePathConfig is enabled — otherwise it has no effect at all. When enabled, this config becomes the single source of truth for submodule gitdir paths and Git will error if it's missing. See git-config(1) for details.

🌸 `submodule.active`

A repeated field containing a pathspec used to match against a submodule's path to determine if the submodule is of interest to git commands. See gitsubmodules(7) for details 🫶

`submodule.recurse`

A boolean that says "hey, should commands turn on --recurse-submodules by default?" Defaults to false — so no, unless you say so.

When you set it to true, you can still turn it off with --no-recurse-submodules. But here's the messy part, bestie: some Git commands don't even have that option, yet they call the commands above that are affected by submodule.recurse. Example: git remote update will call git fetch but has no --no-recurse-submodules option of its own. For those, the workaround is to temporarily change the config value with git -c submodule.recurse=0.

Here's the rundown on which commands take --recurse-submodules and whether this setting plays nice with them:

checkout, fetch, grep, pull, push, read-tree, reset, restore and switch are always supported.
clone and ls-files are not supported.
branch is supported only if submodule.propagateBranches is enabled.

`submodule.propagateBranches`

[EXPERIMENTAL] A boolean that enables branching support when you're using --recurse-submodules or submodule.recurse=true. Turn this on and certain commands will accept --recurse-submodules, and certain commands that already accept --recurse-submodules will now actually consider branches. Defaults to false.

`submodule.fetchJobs`

Tells Git how many submodules get fetched/cloned at the same time. A positive integer allows up to that many submodules fetched in parallel. A value of 0 gives you some reasonable default. If it's unset, it defaults to 1.

`submodule.alternateLocation`

Specifies how submodules obtain alternates when they're cloned. Possible values are no and superproject. By default no is assumed, which doesn't add references. When the value is set to superproject, the submodule being cloned computes its alternates location relative to the superproject's alternate.

`submodule.alternateErrorStrategy`

Specifies how to treat errors with the alternates for a submodule as computed via submodule.alternateLocation. Possible values are ignore, info, die. Default is die. Heads up: if it's set to ignore or info, and there's an error with the computed alternate, the clone proceeds as if no alternate was specified at all.

`tag.forceSignAnnotated`

A boolean specifying whether annotated tags created should be GPG signed. If --annotate is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option. Command line stays the main character 💅

`tag.sort`

This variable controls the sort ordering of tags when git-tag(1) displays them. Without the --sort=<value> option provided, the value of this variable is used as the default.

`tag.gpgSign`

A boolean specifying whether all tags should be GPG signed. Careful though: using this in an automated script can result in a large number of tags being signed. So it's convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase over and over again. Note that this option doesn't affect tag signing behavior enabled by -u <keyid> or --local-user=<keyid> options.

`tar.umask`

This variable can be used to restrict the permission bits of tar archive entries. The default is 0002, which turns off the world write bit. The special value "user" indicates the archiving user's umask will be used instead. See umask(2) and git-archive(1).

⚠️ Trace2 config settings are only read from the system and global config files; repository local and worktree config files and -c command line arguments are not respected. No cap, that's just how it is.

`trace2.normalTarget`

This variable controls the normal target destination. It may be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2 environment variable. The following table shows possible values — but tables are so not happening here, so here's the same list, cute edition:

`trace2.perfTarget`

This variable controls the performance target destination. It may be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_PERF environment variable. Following the same possible values.

`trace2.eventTarget`

This variable controls the event target destination. It may be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT environment variable. Following the same possible values.

And those possible values for all three of the above are:

0 or false — Disables the target. nothing to see here 🦋
1 or true — Writes to STDERR.
[2-9] — Writes to the already opened file descriptor.
<absolute-pathname> — Writes to the file in append mode. If the target already exists and is a directory, the traces will be written to files (one per process) underneath the given directory.
af_unix:[<socket-type>:]<absolute-pathname> — Write to a Unix DomainSocket (on platforms that support them). Socket type can be either stream or dgram; if omitted Git will try both.

`trace2.normalBrief`

Boolean. When true, time, filename, and line fields are omitted from normal output. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_BRIEF environment variable. Defaults to false.

`trace2.perfBrief`

Boolean. When true, time, filename, and line fields are omitted from PERF output. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_PERF_BRIEF environment variable. Defaults to false.

`trace2.eventBrief`

Boolean. When true, time, filename, and line fields are omitted from event output. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT_BRIEF environment variable. Defaults to false.

`trace2.eventNesting`

Integer. Specifies desired depth of nested regions in the event output. Regions deeper than this value will be omitted. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT_NESTING environment variable. Defaults to 2.

`trace2.configParams`

A comma-separated list of patterns of "important" config settings that should be recorded in the trace2 output. For example, core.*,remote.*.url would cause the trace2 output to contain events listing each configured remote. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_CONFIG_PARAMS environment variable. Unset by default.

`trace2.envVars`

A comma-separated list of "important" environment variables that should be recorded in the trace2 output. For example, GIT_HTTP_USER_AGENT,GIT_CONFIG would cause the trace2 output to contain events listing the overrides for HTTP user agent and the location of the Git configuration file (assuming any are set). May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_ENV_VARS environment variable. Unset by default.

`trace2.destinationDebug`

Boolean. When true, Git will print error messages when a trace target destination cannot be opened for writing. By default, these errors are suppressed and tracing is silently disabled. sneaky, honestly. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_DST_DEBUG environment variable.

`trace2.maxFiles`

Integer. When writing trace files to a target directory, don't write additional traces if doing so would exceed this many files. Instead, write a sentinel file that will block further tracing to this directory. Defaults to 0, which disables this check. sentinel file my beloved 🧚

`trailer.separators`

This option tells which characters are recognized as trailer separators. By default only : is recognized as a trailer separator, except that = is always accepted on the command line for compatibility with other git commands.

The first character given by this option will be the default character used when another separator isn't specified in the config for this trailer.

For example, if the value for this option is %=$, — wait, no, if the value is %=$ — then only lines using the format <key><sep><value> with <sep> containing %, = or $ and then spaces will be considered trailers. And % will be the default separator used, so by default trailers will appear like: <key>% <value> (one percent sign and one space will appear between the key and the value).

bestie that <sep> tip is lowkey the whole personality of the trailer config 😭

`trailer.where`

This option tells where a new trailer will be added.

This can be end, which is the default, start, after or before.

If it's end, then each new trailer will appear at the end of the existing trailers.

If it's start, then each new trailer will appear at the start, instead of the end, of the existing trailers.

If it's after, then each new trailer will appear just after the last trailer with the same <key>.

If it's before, then each new trailer will appear just before the first trailer with the same <key>.

`trailer.ifexists`

This option makes it possible to choose what action will be performed when there's already at least one trailer with the same <key> in the input.

The valid values for this option are: addIfDifferentNeighbor (this is the default), addIfDifferent, add, replace or doNothing.

With addIfDifferentNeighbor, a new trailer will be added only if no trailer with the same (<key>, <value>) pair is above or below the line where the new trailer will be added.
With addIfDifferent, a new trailer will be added only if no trailer with the same (<key>, <value>) pair is already in the input.
With add, a new trailer will be added, even if some trailers with the same (<key>, <value>) pair are already in the input. chaos mode, love that for you 💅
With replace, an existing trailer with the same <key> will be deleted and the new trailer will be added. The deleted trailer will be the closest one (with the same <key>) to the place where the new one will be added.
With doNothing, nothing will be done; that is, no new trailer will be added if there's already one with the same <key> in the input.

`trailer.ifmissing`

This option makes it possible to choose what action will be performed when there isn't yet any trailer with the same <key> in the input.

The valid values for this option are: add (this is the default) and doNothing.

With add, a new trailer will be added.

With doNothing, nothing will be done. the vibes of doing absolutely nothing ✨

`trailer.<key-alias>.key`

Defines a <key-alias> for the <key>. The <key-alias> must be a prefix (case does not matter) of the <key>. For example, in git config trailer.ack.key "Acked-by" the Acked-by is the <key> and the ack is the <key-alias>. This configuration allows the shorter --trailer "ack:..." invocation on the command line using the "ack" <key-alias> instead of the longer --trailer "Acked-by:...".

At the end of the <key>, a separator can appear and then some space characters. By default the only valid separator is :, but this can be changed using the trailer.separators config variable.

If there's a separator in the key, then it overrides the default separator when adding the trailer. glow up, honestly 🫶

trailer.<key-alias>.where — this one takes the exact same values as the trailer.where configuration variable, and it overrides what that option says for trailers with the specified <key-alias>. Per-alias override era, no cap. ✨
trailer.<key-alias>.ifexists — same deal: it takes the exact same values as the trailer.ifexists configuration variable, and it overrides what that option says for trailers with the specified <key-alias>. 💅
trailer.<key-alias>.ifmissing — and again, bestie: same values as trailer.ifmissing, overriding what that option says for trailers with the specified <key-alias>. 🎀
trailer.<key-alias>.command — deprecated in favor of trailer.<key-alias>.cmd, okay? It behaves in the same way as trailer.<key-alias>.cmd, except that it doesn’t pass anything as argument to the specified command. Instead, the first occurrence of substring $ARG is replaced by the <value> that would be passed as argument.

Note that $ARG in the user’s command is only replaced once and that the original way of replacing $ARG is not safe. 😭

When both trailer.<key-alias>.cmd and trailer.<key-alias>.command are given for the same <key-alias>, trailer.<key-alias>.cmd is used and trailer.<key-alias>.command is ignored.

trailer.<key-alias>.cmd — this option can be used to specify a shell command that will be called once to automatically add a trailer with the specified <key-alias>, and then called each time a --trailer <key-alias>=<value> argument is specified to modify the <value> of the trailer that this option would produce. 💖

When the specified command is first called to add a trailer with the specified <key-alias>, the behavior is as if a special --trailer <key-alias>=<value> argument was added at the beginning of git-interpret-trailers(1), where <value> is taken to be the standard output of the command with any leading and trailing whitespace trimmed off.

If some --trailer <key-alias>=<value> arguments are also passed on the command line, the command is called again once for each of these arguments with the same <key-alias>. And the <value> part of these arguments, if any, will be passed to the command as its first argument. This way the command can produce a <value> computed from the <value> passed in the --trailer <key-alias>=<value> argument. Obsessed with the little pipeline. 🫶

transfer.credentialsInUrl — bestie, a configured URL can contain plaintext credentials in the form <protocol>://<user>:<password>@<domain>/<path>. You may want to warn or forbid the use of such configuration (in favor of using git-credential(1)). This will be used on git-clone(1), git-fetch(1), git-push(1), and any other direct use of the configured URL. 💀

Note that this is currently limited to detecting credentials in remote.<name>.url configuration; it won’t detect credentials in remote.<name>.pushurl configuration.

You might want to enable this to prevent inadvertent credentials exposure, e.g. because:

The OS or system where you’re running git may not provide a way or otherwise allow you to configure the permissions of the configuration file where the username and/or password are stored.
Even if it does, having such data stored "at rest" might expose you in other ways, e.g. a backup process might copy the data to another system.
The git programs will pass the full URL to one another as arguments on the command-line, meaning the credentials will be exposed to other unprivileged users on systems that allow them to see the full process list of other users. On linux the "hidepid" setting documented in procfs(5) allows for configuring this behavior.

If such concerns don’t apply to you then you probably don’t need to be concerned about credentials exposure due to storing sensitive data in git’s configuration files. If you do want to use this, set transfer.credentialsInUrl to one of these values:

allow (default): Git will proceed with its activity without warning.
warn: Git will write a warning message to stderr when parsing a URL with a plaintext credential.
die: Git will write a failure message to stderr when parsing a URL with a plaintext credential.

transfer.fsckObjects — when fetch.fsckObjects or receive.fsckObjects are not set, the value of this variable is used instead. Defaults to false. 🔥

When set, the fetch or receive will abort in the case of a malformed object or a link to a nonexistent object. In addition, various other issues are checked for, including legacy issues (see fsck.<msg-id>), and potential security issues like the existence of a .GIT directory or a malicious .gitmodules file (see the release notes for v2.2.1 and v2.17.1 for details). Other sanity and security checks may be added in future releases.

On the receiving side, failing fsckObjects will make those objects unreachable, see "QUARANTINE ENVIRONMENT" in git-receive-pack(1). On the fetch side, malformed objects will instead be left unreferenced in the repository.

Due to the non-quarantine nature of the fetch.fsckObjects implementation it cannot be relied upon to leave the object store clean like receive.fsckObjects can. 😭

As objects are unpacked they’re written to the object store, so there can be cases where malicious objects get introduced even though the "fetch" failed, only to have a subsequent "fetch" succeed because only new incoming objects are checked, not those that have already been written to the object store. That difference in behavior should not be relied upon. In the future, such objects may be quarantined for "fetch" as well.

For now, the paranoid need to find some way to emulate the quarantine environment if they’d like the same protection as "push". E.g. in the case of an internal mirror do the mirroring in two steps, one to fetch the untrusted objects, and then do a second "push" (which will use the quarantine) to another internal repo, and have internal clients consume this pushed-to repository, or embargo internal fetches and only allow them once a full "fsck" has run (and no new fetches have happened in the meantime).

transfer.hideRefs — string(s) receive-pack and upload-pack use to decide which refs to omit from their initial advertisements. Use more than one definition to specify multiple prefix strings. A ref that is under the hierarchies listed in the value of this variable is excluded, and is hidden when responding to git push or git fetch. See receive.hideRefs and uploadpack.hideRefs for program-specific versions of this config. 🦋

You may also include a ! in front of the ref name to negate the entry, explicitly exposing it, even if an earlier entry marked it as hidden. If you have multiple hideRefs values, later entries override earlier ones (and entries in more-specific config files override less-specific ones).

If a namespace is in use, the namespace prefix is stripped from each reference before it is matched against transfer.hiderefs patterns. In order to match refs before stripping, add a ^ in front of the ref name. If you combine ! and ^, ! must be specified first.

For example, if refs/heads/master is specified in transfer.hideRefs and the current namespace is foo, then refs/namespaces/foo/refs/heads/master is omitted from the advertisements. If uploadpack.allowRefInWant is set, upload-pack will treat want-ref refs/heads/master in a protocol v2 fetch command as if refs/namespaces/foo/refs/heads/master did not exist. receive-pack, on the other hand, will still advertise the object id the ref is pointing to without mentioning its name (a so-called ".have" line).

Even if you hide refs, a client may still be able to steal the target objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the gitnamespaces(7) man page; it’s best to keep private data in a separate repository. 👑

transfer.unpackLimit — when fetch.unpackLimit or receive.unpackLimit are not set, the value of this variable is used instead. The default value is 100. 🍓
transfer.advertiseSID — Boolean. When true, client and server processes will advertise their unique session IDs to their remote counterpart. Defaults to false. ✨
transfer.bundleURI — when true, local git clone commands will request bundle information from the remote server (if advertised) and download bundles before continuing the clone through the Git protocol. Defaults to false. 🎀
transfer.advertiseObjectInfo — when true, the object-info capability is advertised by servers. Defaults to false. 💅
uploadarchive.allowUnreachable — if true, allow clients to use git archive --remote to request any tree, whether reachable from the ref tips or not. See the discussion in the "SECURITY" section of git-upload-archive(1) for more details. Defaults to false. 🌸
uploadpack.hideRefs — this variable is the same as transfer.hideRefs, but applies only to upload-pack (and so affects only fetches, not pushes). An attempt to fetch a hidden ref by git fetch will fail. See also uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant. 🫶
uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant — when uploadpack.hideRefs is in effect, allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for an object at the tip of a hidden ref (by default, such a request is rejected). See also uploadpack.hideRefs. Even if this is false, a client may be able to steal objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the gitnamespaces(7) man page; it’s best to keep private data in a separate repository. 😭
uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant — allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for an object that is reachable from any ref tip. However, note that calculating object reachability is computationally expensive. Defaults to false. Even if this is false, a client may be able to steal objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the gitnamespaces(7) man page; it’s best to keep private data in a separate repository. 💜
uploadpack.allowAnySHA1InWant — okay so this one lets upload-pack straight up accept a fetch request that asks for any object at all. It implies uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant and uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant — like, set it to true and both of those get turned on, set it to false and both get turned off, no in-between bestie. By default it's not set. 💅
uploadpack.keepAlive — so when upload-pack has started pack-objects, there can be a quiet period while pack-objects gets the pack ready. Normally it'd output progress info, but if --quiet was used for the fetch, pack-objects will output nothing at all until the pack data begins 😭 and some clients and networks may think the server is hung and just give up. Setting this option tells upload-pack to send an empty keepalive packet every uploadpack.keepAlive seconds. Setting it to 0 disables keepalive packets entirely. Default is 5 seconds. 🫶
uploadpack.packObjectsHook — if this is set, when upload-pack would run git pack-objects to create a packfile for a client, it runs this shell command instead. The pack-objects command and arguments it would have run (including the git pack-objects at the beginning) get appended to the shell command. The stdin and stdout of the hook are treated as if pack-objects itself was run — i.e., upload-pack will feed input intended for pack-objects to the hook, and expects a completed packfile on stdout. 🎀

ngl this one is only respected when it's specified in protected configuration (see the section called "SCOPES"). That's a safety measure against fetching from untrusted repositories. Do not skip this. 🔥

uploadpack.allowFilter — if set, upload-pack will support partial clone and partial fetch object filtering. Obsessed. ✨
uploadpackfilter.allow — gives a default value for unspecified object filters (see the config variable right below, iykyk). If set to true, this also enables all filters which get added in the future — main character energy, it's thinking ahead 💜. Defaults to true.
uploadpackfilter.<filter>.allow — explicitly allow or ban the object filter corresponding to <filter>, where <filter> may be one of: blob:none, blob:limit, object:type, tree, sparse:oid, or combine. If you're using combined filters, both combine and all of the nested filter kinds must be allowed. Defaults to uploadpackfilter.allow.
uploadpackfilter.tree.maxDepth — only allows --filter=tree:<n> when <n> is no more than the value of uploadpackfilter.tree.maxDepth. If set, this also implies uploadpackfilter.tree.allow=true, unless this configuration variable had already been set. Has no effect if unset. 🦋
uploadpack.allowRefInWant — if set, upload-pack will support the ref-in-want feature of the protocol version 2 fetch command. This feature is intended for the benefit of load-balanced servers which may not have the same view of what OIDs their refs point to due to replication delay. literally made for the messy server girlies 🌈
url.<base>.insteadOf — any URL that starts with this value will be rewritten to start, instead, with <base>. In cases where some site serves a large number of repositories and serves them with multiple access methods, and some users need to use different access methods, this feature lets people specify any of the equivalent URLs and have Git automatically rewrite the URL to the best alternative for that particular user — even for a never-before-seen repository on the site. When more than one insteadOf string matches a given URL, the longest match is used. 👑

heads up: any protocol restrictions will be applied to the rewritten URL. If the rewrite changes the URL to use a custom protocol or remote helper, you may need to adjust the protocol.*.allow config to permit the request. In particular, protocols you expect to use for submodules must be set to always rather than the default of user. See the description of protocol.allow above. 🫡

url.<base>.pushInsteadOf — any URL that starts with this value will not be pushed to; instead, it will be rewritten to start with <base>, and the resulting URL will be pushed to. In cases where some site serves a large number of repositories with multiple access methods, some of which don't allow push, this feature lets people specify a pull-only URL and have Git automatically use an appropriate URL to push — even for a never-before-seen repository on the site. When more than one pushInsteadOf string matches a given URL, the longest match is used. If a remote has an explicit pushurl, Git will ignore this setting for that remote. 💀
user.name, user.email, author.name, author.email, committer.name, committer.email — the user.name and user.email variables determine what ends up in the author and committer fields of commit objects. If you need the author or committer to be different, you can set author.name, author.email, committer.name, or committer.email. All of these can be overridden by the GIT_AUTHOR_NAME, GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, GIT_COMMITTER_NAME, GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL, and EMAIL environment variables. 🌸

note that the name forms of these variables conventionally refer to some form of a personal name. See git-commit(1) and the environment variables section of git(1) for more info on these settings — and check the credential.username option if you're actually looking for authentication credentials instead. Different thing, bestie, don't mix them up 🙈

user.useConfigOnly — tells Git to avoid trying to guess defaults for user.email and user.name, and instead retrieve the values only from the configuration. For example: if you have multiple email addresses and would like to use a different one for each repository, then with this config option set to true in the global config along with a name, Git will prompt you to set up an email before making new commits in a newly cloned repository. Defaults to false. 🎀
user.signingKey — if git-tag(1) or git-commit(1) isn't selecting the key you want it to automatically when creating a signed tag or commit, you can override the default selection with this variable. This option is passed unchanged to gpg's --local-user parameter, so you may specify a key using any method that gpg supports. If gpg.format is set to ssh this can contain the path to either your private ssh key or the public key when ssh-agent is used. Alternatively it can contain a public key prefixed with key:: directly (e.g.: "key::ssh-rsa XXXXXX identifier"). The private key needs to be available via ssh-agent. If not set Git will call gpg.ssh.defaultKeyCommand (e.g.: "ssh-add -L") and try to use the first key available. For backward compatibility, a raw key which begins with "ssh-", such as "ssh-rsa XXXXXX identifier", is treated as "key::ssh-rsa XXXXXX identifier", but this form is deprecated — use the key:: form instead. ⭐
versionsort.prereleaseSuffix (deprecated) — deprecated alias for versionsort.suffix. Ignored if versionsort.suffix is set. it's giving legacy, we don't use her anymore 💅
versionsort.suffix — even when version sort is used in git-tag(1), tagnames with the same base version but different suffixes are still sorted lexicographically, which results in e.g. prerelease tags appearing after the main release (e.g. "1.0-rc1" after "1.0"). This variable can be specified to determine the sorting order of tags with different suffixes. 🦋 By specifying a single suffix in this variable, any tagname containing that suffix will appear before the corresponding main release. E.g. if the variable is set to "-rc", then all "1.0-rcX" tags will appear before "1.0". If specified multiple times, once per suffix, then the order of suffixes in the configuration will determine the sorting order of tagnames with those suffixes. E.g. if "-pre" appears before "-rc" in the configuration, then all "1.0-preX" tags will be listed before any "1.0-rcX" tags. The placement of the main release tag relative to tags with various suffixes can be determined by specifying the empty suffix among those other suffixes. E.g. if the suffixes "-rc", "", "-ck", and "-bfs" appear in the configuration in this order, then all "v4.8-rcX" tags are listed first, followed by "v4.8", then "v4.8-ckX" and finally "v4.8-bfsX". 😭 this is so much ordering but slay If more than one suffix matches the same tagname, then that tagname will be sorted according to the suffix which starts at the earliest position in the tagname. If more than one different matching suffix starts at that earliest position, then that tagname will be sorted according to the longest of those suffixes. The sorting order between different suffixes is undefined if they are in multiple config files. 💀
web.browser — specifies a web browser that may be used by some commands. Currently only git-instaweb(1) and git-help(1) may use it.
worktree.guessRemote — if no branch is specified and neither -b nor -B nor --detach is used, then git worktree add defaults to creating a new branch from HEAD. If worktree.guessRemote is set to true, worktree add tries to find a remote-tracking branch whose name uniquely matches the new branch name. If such a branch exists, it is checked out and set as "upstream" for the new branch. If multiple matches are found, the command fails. If no such match can be found, it falls back to creating a new branch from the current HEAD. 🍓
worktree.useRelativePaths — link worktrees using relative paths (when "true") or absolute paths (when "false"). This is particularly useful for setups where the repository and worktrees may be moved between different locations or environments. Defaults to "false". 🌈

note that setting worktree.useRelativePaths to "true" implies enabling the extensions.relativeWorktrees config (see git-config(1)), which makes it incompatible with older versions of Git. so cute but do read that twice 🫶

🐛 BUGS 🐛

okay so there's this one cursed thing 👻 When using the deprecated [section.subsection] syntax, changing a value will result in adding a multi-line key instead of a change, if the subsection is given with at least one uppercase character. Like, for example, when the config looks like

[section.subsection]
  key = value1

and you run git config section.Subsection.key value2 the result will be

[section.subsection]
  key = value1
  key = value2

not me getting two keys 💀 that's the bug, that's the whole bug, periodt.

🧚 GIT 🧚

Part of the git(1) suite. obviously 💅 family.

📝 NOTES 📝

the bundle URI design document file:///usr/share/doc/git-doc/technical/bundle-uri.html

and that's the whole page bestie, we ate and left zero crumbs 🎀✨ this gem is Git 2.56.0, dated 2026-09-27 — go be iconic with your configs, mwah 💖🫶👑

📦 where this page comes from

arch rolling: git 2.56.0-1 · GPL-2.0-only
💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on 2026-11-06: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms

GIT-CONFIG(1)

💅 GIT-CONFIG(1) 💅

✨ NAME ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

💖 COMMANDS 💖

✨ OPTIONS ✨

💀 DEPRECATED MODES 💀

🎀 CONFIGURATION 🎀

🗂️ FILES

🎯 SCOPES

🛡️ Protected configuration

🌱 ENVIRONMENT

🌈 EXAMPLES

📜 CONFIGURATION FILE

✍️ Syntax

🌸 Includes 🌸

🔮 Conditional includes 🔮

🦋 gitdir

💜 gitdir/i

🌈 worktree

🧚 worktree/i

🍓 onbranch

⭐ hasconfig:remote.*.url

🎀 Example 🎀

✨ VALUES ✨

🦋 boolean

true

false

🌸 integer

🎀 color

🔥 pathname

💜 VARIABLES 💜

🍓 add.ignoreErrors, add.ignore-errors (deprecated)

⭐ advice.*

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.maxMerges

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableThreshold

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableSize

blame.blankBoundary

blame.coloring

blame.date

blame.showEmail

blame.showRoot

blame.ignoreRevsFile

blame.markUnblamableLines

blame.markIgnoredLines

branch.autoSetupMerge

branch.autoSetupRebase

branch.sort

branch.<name>.remote

branch.<name>.pushRemote

branch.<name>.merge

branch.<name>.mergeOptions

branch.<name>.rebase

branch.<name>.description

branch.<name>.deleteMerged

browser.<tool>.cmd

browser.<tool>.path

bundle.*

bundle.version

bundle.mode

bundle.heuristic

core.fsmonitorHookVersion

core.trustctime

core.splitIndex

core.untrackedCache

core.checkStat

core.quotePath

core.eol

core.safecrlf

core.autocrlf

core.checkRoundtripEncoding

core.symlinks

core.gitProxy

core.sshCommand

core.ignoreStat

core.preferSymlinkRefs

core.alternateRefsCommand

🦋 `gitdir`

💜 `gitdir/i`

🌈 `worktree`

🧚 `worktree/i`

🍓 `onbranch`

⭐ `hasconfig:remote.*.url`

🍓 `add.ignoreErrors`, `add.ignore-errors` (deprecated)

⭐ `advice.*`

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate`

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold`

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.maxMerges`

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableThreshold`

`bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableSize`

`blame.blankBoundary`

`blame.coloring`

`blame.date`

`blame.showEmail`

`blame.showRoot`

`blame.ignoreRevsFile`

`blame.markUnblamableLines`

`blame.markIgnoredLines`

`branch.autoSetupMerge`

`branch.autoSetupRebase`

`branch.sort`

`branch.<name>.remote`

`branch.<name>.pushRemote`

`branch.<name>.merge`

`branch.<name>.mergeOptions`

`branch.<name>.rebase`

`branch.<name>.description`

`branch.<name>.deleteMerged`

`browser.<tool>.cmd`

`browser.<tool>.path`

`bundle.*`

`bundle.version`

`bundle.mode`

`bundle.heuristic`

`core.fsmonitorHookVersion`

`core.trustctime`

`core.splitIndex`

`core.untrackedCache`

`core.checkStat`

`core.quotePath`

`core.eol`

`core.safecrlf`

`core.autocrlf`

`core.checkRoundtripEncoding`

`core.symlinks`

`core.gitProxy`

`core.sshCommand`

`core.ignoreStat`

`core.preferSymlinkRefs`

`core.alternateRefsCommand`

🌈 `fastimport.unpackLimit`

✨ `feature.*`

🧪 `feature.experimental`

🗂️ `feature.manyFiles`

🌀 `fetch.recurseSubmodules`

🔍 `fetch.fsckObjects`

🩺 `fetch.fsck.<msg-id>`

📋 `fetch.fsck.skipList`

📦 `fetch.unpackLimit`

🧹 `fetch.prune`

🏷️ `fetch.pruneTags`

🌍 `fetch.all`

🖨️ `fetch.output`

`fetch.negotiationAlgorithm`

`fetch.showForcedUpdates`

`fetch.parallel`

`fetch.writeCommitGraph`

`fetch.bundleURI`

`fetch.bundleCreationToken`

`fetch.followRemoteHEAD`

`filter.<driver>.clean`

`filter.<driver>.smudge`

`format.attach`

`format.from`

`format.forceInBodyFrom`

`format.numbered`

`format.headers`