Most of the time, when looking at history in a git repository, I am most interested in changes at a higher level than an individual commit. From time to time, however, I really want to look at each commit on its own. So, I created git-walklog. For each commit in the range specified, it:

  1. Shows the standard log format: author, date, and commit message. Then it waits for input.
  2. Hitting enter then runs git difftool on just that commit, showing you any differences in your configured difftool 1.

If you want to skip a commit, all you need to do is type ’n’ or ’no'.

I usually use git log with different options till I get it to just show the entries I’m interested in and then replace log with walklog to cruise through the commits.

Examples

To see the last three commits:

git walklog -3 --reverse

To see the changes for a particular branch:

git walklog master..branch --reverse

To see what came in the last git pull:

git walklog master@{1}.. --reverse

I usually put --reverse in there, because I want to see the commits in the same order as they were created.

Enjoy.

  1. You do have a difftool configured, don’t you? Run git config --global diff.tool vimdiff and then use git difftool instead of git diff and all your diffs will show up in vimdiff. Works for other diffing tools too, look for “Valid merge tools” in man difftool. ↩︎