I’ve been using Visual Studio Online for a bit, so the example in this post will specifically show that, but the concept applies anywhere.

If you have a project up there named foo, the git clone URI is something like

https://you.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_git/foo

It’s a real pain to type all that. So I did this in my .gitconfig

[alias]
qc-ds = "!f() { p=${1}; d=${2-$1}; git clone https://me.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_git/$p $d; }; f"

Usage⌗

To clone myproject into myproject,

git qc-ds myproject

To clone myproject into somedirectory,

git qc-ds myproject somedirectory

Breakdown⌗

qc stands for quick clone.

ds is an abbreviation of the me part of my VSO account. It’s meaningful to me. Make yours whatever you want.

The rest creates a function and executes it. The first argument is assigned to p (“project”). The second is optional and is assigned to d (“directory”). It defaults to p if not supplied. Then it’s just filling in the blanks.

Caveat⌗

This gets a little weirder if you have multiple repositories in a project, e.g. a second repo named bar inside of the foo project

https://you.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/foo/_git/bar

I know how I’m going to tackle this, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.

And of course, if you’re on GitHub, BitBucket, or whatever…the repo URIs are usually pretty standard. Just :s it!