[Community Plugin] gitbutler-omz — Oh My Zsh plugin + discussion on git alias overrides

[batuhan0sanli]

Introducing gitbutler-omz

Hi! I've been working on an Oh My Zsh plugin for GitButler:
👉 https://github.com/batuhan0sanli/gitbutler-omz

It currently provides three things:

1. 50+ but CLI aliases — short, memorable shortcuts grouped by workflow
   (bst, bbn, bcm, bcai, bp, bundo, …)

2. Git Protection Shield — wraps the git command and intercepts destructive
   operations (add, commit, push, checkout, merge, rebase, stash,
   cherry-pick, branch) while on gitbutler/workspace, prompting for
   confirmation before proceeding.

3. Prompt integration — replaces the branch name in standard OMZ themes and
   Powerlevel10k with live workspace metrics (active branch count, dirty state,
   pending pushes).

I'm opening this issue to share the project and gather feedback from the team and
the community. Any thoughts are welcome!

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Discussion topics

1. General suggestions

Are there any features, aliases, or shell integrations you'd like to see in a plugin
like this? Common workflows that feel awkward without a shortcut? Things the
protection shield should or shouldn't cover?

2. Overriding standard git/OMZ aliases

One area I'm considering — but unsure about — is overriding the well-known
Oh My Zsh git aliases to point to but equivalents. There are two levels of
this:

Level 1 — Simple command substitution
Map the familiar OMZ shorthand to the equivalent but command:

OMZ alias	Current behavior	Proposed behavior
gst	git status	but status
gd	git diff	but diff
gcmsg	git commit -m	but commit -m
gp	git push	but push
gl	git pull	but pull

These are purely cosmetic redirects — same intent, different backend.

Level 2 — Behavioral overrides
Some aliases could go further and adapt the behavior to GitButler's model.
The most interesting example is gco (git checkout):

In vanilla git, gco my-feature switches your working tree to my-feature.
In GitButler, branches are applied/unapplied, not checked out. A faithful
equivalent would be:

1. Unapply all currently applied branches
2. Apply only my-feature

This would let muscle memory carry over for users migrating from a traditional
git workflow, while keeping the underlying GitButler semantics intact.

Questions for the team / community:

• Is this kind of alias layering something you'd encourage or discourage?
• Are there edge cases in the gco-style behavioral override that make it
  dangerous (e.g. uncommitted changes, stacked branches)?
• Would it make more sense to ship these as an opt-in flag rather than the default?

[Byron]

Thanks so much for sharing and for starting the discussion on this.

Maybe this would be a good place to share Esteban's comment on Discord, where he seems to be trying this plugin already and loving it: https://discord.com/channels/1060193121130000425/1204524097241878629/1490068645764923503

My personal opinion is simple. Since you are maintaining it, you can of course just go for it. And as it gains traction maybe one day it can be hosted in this repository (or a separate one for community contributions) as well.

From a technical perspective, I'd be most concerned about performance. And right now, the but CLI already has performance issues that we need to work on. That can easily compound when running more than one but CLI command to populate the zsh prompt.

Something I think we could be discussing here as well is how to support shell prompts better, maybe by providing more specialized supplements that compute exactly what's needed as fast as possible.

[krlvi]

Hey @batuhan0sanli — one useful update since this thread: but switch has landed, so I’d make gco a thin opt-in alias to that rather than scripting “unapply everything, then apply one branch”. but alias and but completions zsh are built in too, which lets the plugin focus on the OMZ and prompt integration.

A few aliases in the current README now need updating: but mark and but unmark were removed in 0.20.4, and but merge was removed in 0.21.0 in favor of but land.

I’d keep overrides of familiar git aliases opt-in. Silently changing the semantics behind muscle memory is too surprising, especially for checkout-like operations.