I'm using Cygwin and the git (v1.7.9) that came with it by default (/usr/bin/git). I also have msysgit (v1.7.11.msysgit.0) installed. In my .bashrc, I do
export GIT_CONFIG=path_to_.gitconfig
and when I run git config --list, I get the contents of my .gitconfig (relevant excerpt below):
...
alias.co=checkout
alias.br=branch
alias.ci=commit
alias.st=status
alias.logp=log --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s"
alias.logl=log --pretty=oneline
alias.graph=log --pretty=format:"%h - %an : %s" --graph
...
however, if I run git ci -m "this is a test" I get
git: 'ci' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
Did you mean one of these?
am
citool
commit
config
diff
fsck
gc
init
mv
rm
Does the git that comes with cygwin have to be set up differently?
Figured, that git will try writing to the .gitconfig file it was loading when aliasing a new command so I ran git config --global alias.testalias random_git_command. Then from my home directory
grepc -R testalias ./
I was able to determine that it was using ~/.gitconfig. So the solution was to make a symlink ln -s [path_to_desired_.gitconfig] .gitconfig in my home directory.
Still finding weird that when I ran git config --list I could see the list of aliases, but when I tried running them, git would not recognize them as a valid alias...