I recently discovered aliases in git – very useful. So far my favorites have been log commands. The first alias below will create a decorated (shows refs) oneline log summary along with an ascii graph of the branch history. The second will show the author’s relative date, the hash id (sha1), and the subject (message) of any events in the ref log.
git config --global alias.plog 'log --oneline --decorate --graph` git config --global alias.rtlog 'log --pretty=format:"%ar : %h : %s"'
Protocol Vital 