TIL

Finding the History of a Function or Object

log -L :foo will show you the history of the function/object called foo. This is a smarter version of normal log -L which just knows about lines.

But because I’m lazy to even type this out, I made git pylog to just be able to type g pylog foo.bar.baz and find the history of the FQON there.

Finding Commits by Message

git show :/foo will find the last commit whose message contains foo. It accepts a regex.

Specifically, git show :^Merge should generally find the last merge commit.

Showing Various Parts of a Merge Conflict

git show :N:foo.txt will show foo.txt from “stage” number N, which is useful during conflict resoluton.

Custom Bisect Terms

Using git bisect good sometimes hurts my brain if “good” isn’t the right term for the commit being marked. git bisect however has --term-old and --term-new arguments for changing good and bad to whatever you want, so e.g.:

$ git bisect start --term-old fast --term-new slow

will allow using git bisect fast and git bisect slow instead for the current bisection (e.g. for finding commits which introduced performance issues).

git name-rev

name-rev can append info about the position of a commit relative to tags.

It can do this even interspersed in other prose text.

E.g., given say a comment saying:

I think this bug was caused by dc9061e8ffb5002e33688ae97d0d953818e89bae and fixed in d099d7e84d1ce3cf9737e9785be339c917f4a3e3.

piping that to git name-rev --stdin will output:

I think this bug was caused by dc9061e8ffb5002e33688ae97d0d953818e89bae (v1.0.0~2) and fixed in d099d7e84d1ce3cf9737e9785be339c917f4a3e3 (v1.0.1).

See its man page for more stuff.

Tags Matching a Pattern

git tag -l doesn’t just list all tags, it can take a pattern and show only matching ones, e.g.:

$ g tag -l v*

for showing version tags.

git shortlog

shortlog gives a nice summarized version of the log, e.g. for release notes.

Listing or Looping Over Revisions

git for-each-ref will loop over given revisions.

git rev-list will simply list them (in reverse order).

Sending Patches Over Email

format-patch turns commits into patches as a file, and formatted for sending via email or applying with git am.

Rebasing… All the Way

rebase -i --root will rebase all the way to the empty tree (e.g. will allow fixuping something onto the very first commit in a repo).