I don’t know about you but while I’m pretty comfy with git cli for most routine operations, there are a few
things that I do like a GUI for - most notably going through git history. Like most of you, I have an alias
in my ~/.gitconfig to show logs on one line
[alias]
lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative --date-orderWhile this is usually enough, it’s not for cases when I need to search through history for commits touching a specific
file or having some specific word/regex. In these cases, I generally fire up Git Extensions. Recently, I found myself
on a remote session and instead of cloning the repo locally and using git extensions, decided to figure out git log
once and for all :)
So here goes - 4 commands to rule over your git history:
-
Search through git commit contents for 'webpack' with
-G$ git log -i -G 'webpack' # -i - case insensitive 4834b43 - Migrate to yarn (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan> b494013 - upgrade css-loader - error query string empty fix (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan> ... -
If you rather want to just search through the commit log messages, then use
--grep$ git log -i --grep 'webpack' 4dbffb0 - webpack: Once again a set of fixes around Sourcemaps!! (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan> be20d55 - WIP - HMR with webpack-dev-server (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan> -
So now, once you have a commit, if you’d like to see the diff, use
git show <commitid>- this will show you the commit message and a colorized diff of the commit. -
Finally, if you want to find all commits that touched a particular path, you can use
log --follow$ git log --follow src/WebUI/webpack.config.js da9e1d2 - (origin/web, web) cleanup: format with prettier (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan> 4dbffb0 - webpack: Once again a set of fixes around Sourcemaps!! (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan> f5cac5e - mulitple fixes (3 weeks ago) <Raghu Rajagopalan>
