A handy Git shortcut to fetch and prune

I’m still writing my Git commands long-hand. No aliases. In revisiting an article from last year, it struck me that there’s a built in shortcut to perform a command that I gave as an example:

It bugs me that pruning doesn’t happen with a fetch, like it does in Tower, so aliasing git fetch && git remote prune origin to gf or something like that would be lovely

Well, it turns out there’s a -prune flag for the fetch command in Git! So while aliasing a fetch and a prune to gf would be going too far (for me), git fetch && git remote prune origin can be written as git fetch -prune, and that’s a proper Git command. Even better, the -prune flag can be shortened to -p! So the shortcut is:

git fetch -p

Now I can refresh my view of the remote repo while at the same time getting rid of ‘dead’ branches up on my remote, all less than half the characters!