A common thing I do with git is push my changes to a remote repo, after first updating my project locally with all the changes others have pushed. But I always forget to update first, so the process usually goes–

• push
• rap my fingers on the table for five seconds while my laptop talks to github on the other side of the world
• “oh crap I should have pulled first”
• pull
• update submodules
• push
• “hmm, what did I just push”
• get a coffee (this step should have been first).

So, I made a little alias to handle it all for me, dropping in my new commits alias:

alias gitp='git pull &&
  git log ORIG_HEAD..HEAD \
    --pretty=format:"%Cblue%h%Creset %Cgreen%an%Creset %s" | cat &&
  echo &&
  git submodule update &&
  git log $(git config branch.master.remote)/master..master \
    --pretty=format:"%Cblue%h%Creset %Cgreen%an%Creset %s" | cat &&
  echo &&
  git push'

This alias pulls, lists the new commits, updates submodules, lists the commits that are about to be pushed, and then pushes them.

Since the log comes after the pull, it shows a list of the commits that were just pulled down along with a snippet of their commit message. I like this because it lets me see what everyone else has done in the last little while every time I hit the shared repo.