git fetch only for current branch

Question

I know that I can fetch any remote branch to any local branch, but is there also some kind of shortcut to fetch just from the tracked remote branch to the current tracking local branch (without the need to specify the local and remote branch names explicitly)?

Motivation: I want to just fetch remote changes for the current branch to avoid getting (maybe large) changes from currently irrelevant branches. I will merge/rebase later in a separate step.

Answer 1

Tying together a few things from the existing answers...

Get the name of the checked out branch:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

To answer your question, how do you fetch only the current branch? Here you go, as an alias called fetchthis. Use like git fetchthis.

git config --global alias.fetchthis '!bname=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD); git fetch origin $bname'

Tested in Git for Windows:

$ git --version
git version 2.25.1.windows.1