Using aliases
=============

What are aliases?
-----------------

Command aliases are an easy way to customize the behaviour of Bazaar. Aliases
are an easy way to create shortcuts for commonly-typed commands, or to set
defaults for commands.

Defining aliases
----------------

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

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

Here are the explanations of the examples above:

 * The first alias makes a new ``recentlog`` command that shows the logs for the
   last three revisions
 * The ``ll`` alias shows the last 10 log entries in line format.
 * the ``commit`` alias sets the default for commit to refuse to commit if new
   files in the tree are not recognized.
 * the ``diff`` alias adds the coveted -p option to diff

Using the aliases
-----------------

The aliases defined above would be used like so: ::

   % bzr recentlog
   % bzr ll
   % bzr commit
   % bzr diff

Rules for aliases
-----------------

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

 * Aliases can override the standard behaviour of existing commands by giving
   an alias name that is the same as the orignal command. For example, default
   commit is changed with ``commit=commit --strict``.
 * Aliases cannot refer to other aliases. In other words making a
   ``lastlog`` alias and referring to it with a ``ll`` alias will not work.
   This includes aliases that override standard commands
 * Giving the ``--no-aliases`` to the bzr command will tell it to ignore aliases
   for that run. For example, running ``bzr --no-aliases commit`` will perform a
   standard commit instead not do a ``commit --strict``.