Alvin Crespo

Ever wonder how you can easily check out your git timeline locally, without having to use a GUI or have to go to Github? Yeah, there is an easy way.

You can configure your global config to this:

[format]
	pretty = %ad %Cred%h%Creset %C(yellow)%d%Creset %s <%Cgreen%an%Creset>
[log]
	decorate = short

I’ve been using this since my time at Customer.io. Thanks to Stephen for showing me this!.

This will produce a timeline like:

For information around formatting, check out the --format flag documentation.

If you’d prefer to avoid creating a global configuration for viewing your timeline, you can easily use --oneline and --graph flags in your terminal, thanks to Chris Achard for this one!

So what does this command do?

git log --oneline --graph

Let’s break it down:

The git documentation specifies that --oneline is just a shortcut for:

--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

In practice, it looks like this:

git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --graph

Finally, what does --graph do? Again, going back to git’s documentation:

Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit history on the left hand side of the output.

Basically, * is used to represent a single line in your timeline.

Alright! Thank you for reading my learnings from today. Did you learn something new? Anything here that I got wrong or can improve on? Let me know at @alvincrespo.

Cheers!