Chapter 4. History visualization
This chapter covers
- Filtering git log output commits
- Formatting git log output to display the information you care about
- Finding why and when a line in a file was changed, and by whom, using git blame
- Identifying which commit caused a particular bug using git bisect
In this chapter, you’ll learn about visualizing the history of a Git repository in varying formats. When working with a Git repository on large, long-running software projects, you’ll sometimes want to dig through the history to identify old versions of code, work out why and by whom changes were made, or analyze the changes to identify why a bug is occurring. You can do this to a limited extent using the commands you’ve already learned (git log and git diff) and extend this with two more we’ll cover in this chapter: git blame and git bisect.
Let’s start by learning how to optimize your use of git log to list only particular commits.