Ever since the original Rails Tutorial we've needed git checkout to be aliased as git co. We run that command so often the saved keystrokes probably save a significant amount of time each year.

Here's how we do it in 2020. Simply add an alias to ~/.gitconfig like so:

[alias]
    co = checkout

In the process we also found a neat tutorial for all kinds of aliases that you could set up in ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc. We added:

alias gaa='git add .'
alias gcm='git commit --message'

... since those are our two most common commands. We didn't add any other aliases since we don't like adding complexity to rarely used tasks.

Also, as one last pro-tip here is a great post on zshrc / bashrc, etc. loading orders. This is useful if you've ever found your changes don't seem to work... and remember:

source ~/.zshrc