misc quality of life improvements

MISC.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+# Miscellaneous
+
+There some things that are good to know, but not strictly necessary. Here's an (incompplete) list of the ideas. Please feel free to add any 'life hacks' you know/discover to this!
+
+## Clone depth
+
+In old repos, there's ususally a lot of history. So, cloning them often takes many GBs, while the actual code you'd like to download(to, for example, browse around) is only a few dozen MBs. To get around this, we can use `git clone --depth 1`. For example, `git clone --depth 1 [email protected]:pytorch/pytorch.git` takes significantly less time than cloning the entire repo.
+
+## Aliases
+
+There are some commands that we use all the time(for example, `git status`). To avoid typing `status` every single time, we can tell git to interpret `git s` as `git status`. To do this, run
+
+```bash
+git config --global alias.s status
+```
+
+You can replace `s` with anything other alias. The `--global` flag tells git that we want this setting to be applied everywhere.
+
+## gitconfig
+
+You can make a lot of tweaks to git to make it better. For example, if you misspell commands all the time, you can tell git to autocorrect you and run the command in a couple of seconds:
+
+```bash
+git config --global help.autoCorrect 50
+```
+
+This will autocorrect your commands(for example, from `git rebaes` to `git rebase`) in 5 seconds and run it.
+
+Some other common options are(thanks @Animeshz for these):
+
+```bash
+git config --global user.email <email> # set your default commit email
+git config --global user.name <full-name> # set your default commit name
+git config --global core.editor code  # use vscode to edit commit messages etc
+git config --global core.editor vim  # use vim to edit commit messages etc
+git config --global core.editor nano  # use nano to edit commit messages etc
+
+```
+
+A complete list of all configuration options can be found [here](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config).