A (even) better git log | Davide Vernizzi

TL;DR:

I have moved from a git GUI back to command line interface. I use the following commands to have a better git log that works in the shell and to have it as git alias. It’s not as good as the GUI, but it’s good enough to see what’s going on in the repo.

$ git log --graph --branches --oneline --decorate --pretty=format:'%C(yellow)%h%Creset -%C(auto)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset'

$ git config --global alias.lg "log --graph --branches --oneline --decorate --pretty=format:'%C(yellow)%h%Creset -%C(auto)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset'"

$ git lg

Recently I have decided to move from SourceTree back to command line git. Don’t get me wrong, SourceTree is a great software, but where I work we use a set of scripts to manage git branches so that concurrent features and versions are correctly related each other and, unfortunately, this is not 100% compatible with SourceTree. So to avoid errors due to using SourceTree instead of our custom git commands, I have decided to go back to command line. However, after using SourceTree I got used to its visual display of the graph of commits. Fortunately, git has a built-in mechanisms to show such a graph, the --graph flag, usually coupled with --oneline.

However, we can do better. I have found a post where it is shown a better git log. The result is quite okay, but we can still make a little better. I have found this StackOverflow answer that suggests to use --decorate to achieve something similar. I still prefer the former version, however the latter has nicely coloured branches.

Better git log

Even better git log

After searching a while, I have found that these branches are the decorations printed by --decoration and by %d in the custom git log. The post used %C(yellow)%d to color the decorations in yellow, but if we use %C(auto)%d the decorations will be nicely colored, just as --decoration would do.