Graphing The Git Log

The default git log is useful but not necessarily optimized for day-to-day reviewing of history. If you need a subsef ot the information displayed in each commit you can use git log --oneline, this will only display abrreviated commit hash and commit message subject (that are the first 50 characters of your commit message).

But lets get interesting, the following will proved a nicely organized and concise view of the log:

$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all -30

Let’s break this down:

• online: This display abbreviate commit hash & message
• decorate: Display the local and remote branches along with the commit hash
• graph: Draw the commits with ASCII art lines to identify branching
• all: Show the history of all branches, not just the current branch
• < number >: Show only the specified number of commits, rather than paging through all commits

Of course all of this is a bit of handful to type out, git aliasto the rescue for sure:

$ git config --global alias.sla 'log --oneline --decorate --graph --all'

For now on we can just use git sla which wraps all of those options.