I would recommend tig for this sort of thing: http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/ In fact, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's typically just as necessary as git on any machine I'm working on.

For those as confused as I was, the code is silently swallowed if you have JavaScript turned off.

If you're on a Mac, you'll need to install gawk (at least I did on 10.7).

Probably the easiest way to do this is with homebrew[1]:

    brew install gawk

[1] If you don't know about homebrew, check out https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew. It's a package manager for Mac.

I usually want to pass arguments to git log, not to less. This is not possible with the default piped alias. This is remedied by wrapping it in a function, and pasting the arguments explicitly to git log using the bash shorthand $@. Here is an updated version of your l80 that supports passing parameters to git log:

l = "!f() { git log $@ --abbrev-commit --date=short --pretty=format:'%x00%h%x00%cd%x00%s%x00%an%x00%d' | gawk -F '\\0' '{ printf \"%s\\033[31m%s\\033[0m \\033[32m%s\\033[0m %-80s \\033[30;1m%s\\033[0m\\033[33m%s\\n\", $1, $2, $3, gensub(/(.{79}).{2,}/, \"\\\\1\",\"g\",$4), $5, $6 }' | less -R ; } ; f"

I get a bad config file error when I copy the aliases into my .gitconfig.

Edit: Something to do with copy/pasting from the browser. Cloning the gist repository and copying directly in vim works fine.