#reverse git log

Teacher: teh Googles and my own intelligence. (OMG A FIRST.)

If, like in my previous post, you are reading a big git log -p --reverse e4bb271..HEAD or similar, you might want to duck in and out to make notes. Maybe you want to jump a few lines. For whatever reason, let's assume you want to use line numbers and you want to use the standard less.

When inside the git log, type -N or --LINE-NUMBERS if you're feeling particularly masochistic (source). This will make the line numbers appear, and you'll lose half your terminal window to leading whitespace on those numbers.

Teacher: @jasoncodes

Sometimes, when you're being a responsible team member and developer, you'll be in the position of having to read a bunch of other people's commits. If your team codes well, they will be finely grained and in reverse chronological order, but scrolling from the bottom of a lessed git log -p is not my favourite way of reading code.

Enter git log --reverse. Use this in conjunction with ranged commit hash arguments and -p to reverse the order of a series of commits while viewing the modifications.

For example:

$ git log --reverse -p origin/master..HEAD $ git log --reverse -p e1c21f8..a8d733b