The colors are merely meant to help you view the lines as distinct from other lines. To answer question #1, they are assigned not pseudo-randomly, but rather sequentially, each time git log –graph picks a new “column number”. Unfortunately there are two issues I know of. Both tie into your question #2. Here is the … Read more
This will be possible with Git 2.4+ (Q2 2015): see commit 22dfa8a by Christoph Junghans (junghans): log: teach –invert-grep option “git log –grep=<string>” shows only commits with messages that match the given string, but sometimes it is useful to be able to show only commits that do not have certain messages (e.g. “show me ones … Read more
You want to use the for-each-ref command. Unfortunately, it’s only slightly less user friendly than filter-branch Note that information like tag date and the tagger is only available for annotated tags. Below is a basic prototype. Note that the format= can be an entire shell script of its own, and probably should be depending on … Read more
git log takes (among other things): -n num to limit the number of commits shown: choose 1 (and if num is 9 or less you can just write -num, hence, -1, for short) –pretty=format:string with directives to change the log output format. The %s directive gets the commit “subject”, which is what you also get … Read more
The commit 52f425e1 (August, 30th 2013) mentions: Encourage new users to use ‘log‘ instead. These days, these commands are unified and just have different defaults. ‘git log‘ only allowed you to view the log messages and no diffs when it was added in early June 2005. It was only in early April 2006 that the … Read more
git config log.decorate auto For a global setting, add the –global parameter. So it would be: git config –global log.decorate auto The aliases are made with git config alias.lg “log –decorate”
git log A B shows the history of both commits A and B (basically generating a union set of each commits’ history). Usually you want git log A..B, which can also be written as git log ^B A (show everything reachable from A, but not (^) from B). This range can also be empty (for … Read more
The “size” of a commit can mean different things. If you mean how much disk storage it takes up… that’s very tricky to tell in Git and probably unproductive. Whereas something like SVN stores commits as deltas, when you change a file in Git it stores a new copy of the file as an object … Read more
You can use git show referencing the third parent from your current commit (i.e. the second ancestor from HEAD). Also, git show accepts the same format string as git log: git show HEAD~2 –pretty=format:”%h” –no-patch Update (2016-12-01) An even better way would be to use the rev-parse plumbing command with the –short option to output … Read more
The asterisks show where something was committed: e1193f8, 5a09431 and 30e367c were committed to the left branch (yielding a | on the right branch) whereas 420eac9 was committed to the right branch (yielding a | on the left branch). And that is how 420eac9 differs from the rest: it’s the only commit to the right … Read more