Given

$localBranch = git branch --show-current
$remote = git config branch.$localBranch.remote
$remoteBranch = git config branch.$localBranch.merge
$remoteTrackingBranch = $remote/$remoteBranch

when I do git push, it seems to implicitly do git push <source>:<target> where

• <source> := $localBranch, and
• <target> := $remote $remoteBranch

This updates both the remote-tracking branch and the remote branch to match the local branch.

I would like for git pull to have a similar behavior. git pull does git fetch followed by git merge. So, I would like for git fetch (whether called explicitly, or via git pull) to parallel git push, i.e. I would like for git fetch to implicitly do git fetch <source>:<target> where

• <source> := $remote $remoteBranch, and
• <target> := $localBranch

This would updates both the remote-tracking branch to match the remote branch.

If doing git pull, the subsequent git merge would update the local branch to match the remote-tracking branch and remote branch.

Is there a way to induce this behavior? If so how? Maybe by editing the config file (git config --edit). Would I make an alias for fetch?

Currently, git fetch fetches many remote branches* to the local repo, which I do not want.

*Does this via git config -get-all remote.origin.fetch which looks like

...
+refs/heads/dev/jv/*:refs/remotes/origin/dev/jv/*
+refs/heads/feature/*:refs/remotes/origin/feature/*
+refs/heads/hotfix/*:refs/remotes/origin/hotfix/*
refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master