Blog 1

Random Talk on Random Thoughts

Searching Git Commit Messages

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Problem

The solution for the problem posed in the title is pretty simple. For instance, I want to find all Git commits whose commit message contains “HTTPS”.1

$ git log -2 --grep="HTTPS"
commit 7400582e268f4a5b776269cf0cc08c04886a4769
Author: Vincent Tam <fake@live.hk>
Date:   Sun Mar 20 20:19:47 2016 +0800

    Updated my Rakefile with HTTPS

commit b6f4f1fc872affc1107b330042d7b43b45e60595
Author: Vincent Tam <fake@live.hk>
Date:   Mon Feb 8 00:45:02 2016 +0800

    A new article about Flair, Octopress and HTTPS

However, I think that the output isn’t compact enough. I would like to display the following information.

<short SHA1> <commit time> <commit message title>

Solution

$ git log -2 --grep="HTTPS" --pretty="%h %cd %s"
7400582 Sun Mar 20 20:19:47 2016 +0800 Updated my Rakefile with HTTPS
b6f4f1f Mon Feb 8 00:45:02 2016 +0800 A new article about Flair, Octopress and HTTPS

Lessons learnt

  1. Some pretty formats in Git
    • %h: short SHA1
    • %H: full SHA1
    • %an: author name
    • %cd: commit date
    • %s: subject
    • %b: body
  2. Automatically escape special characters in Vim

    • Adding a backslash before each % in

        :r !git log -2 --grep="HTTPS" --pretty="\%h \%cd \%s"

      is tedious and prone to errors.

    • A more convenient way

        :exec escape('r !git log -2 --grep="HTTPS" --pretty="%h %cd %s"', '%')

  1. To avoid junk mail, I replaced the first four letters of my email address with fake. ↩

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