Sort branches by last commit date | Hacker News Reader

Sort branches by last commit date

ryangreenberg.com

139 pointsspeckx53 comments

Even better (IMHO!) is `git config branch.sort -committerdate` (note the `-`). This will sort newest committer date first.

I have this as an alias in my .zshrc!! Very handy

`git config --global branch.sort -committerdate`

Thanks!

Rebase an old branch and it suddenly looks recent again. The rewritten tip gets a fresh committer date.

Yes. This is what one wants, since if you have recently rebased it, you're clearly doing work with it. Meanwhile, branches you don't care to touch sink to the bottom of the list.

I would hope so

.gitconfig:

  ```
  [rebase]
      instructionFormat = %s%nexec GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=\"%cI\" GIT_COMMITTER_NAME=\"%cN\" GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=\"%cE\" git commit --amend --no-edit%n
      committerDateIsAuthorDate = true
  ```

Even better, "hey, chat GPT, list my branches by commit date."

I know that's not a popular answer, but I'm just trying to demonstrate the reality that this kind of knowledge isn't specialized anymore.

Heh. "Just Google it" answers we're never particular conversation lubricant as they are not now. But of course you are right we live in age of wonder once again.

What makes knowledge "specialized" to you? Most devs use git.

Even better than ChatGPT is just doing the thing on reflex. Not every manual step is necessarily a tedious chore nor even slower when you actually know what you're doing.

I'm not saying this out of hubris, but there's no man vs machine story here when the machine needs babysitting and is still worse at everything. Nobody is resisting AI at this point. We just need to get shit done and that always requires knowing something. Every new technology quickly hits a ceiling and finds its niche. This isn't it.

It's not worse than the man. It's better. You're just trying to protect your ego. It's ridiculous.

I'm fairly certain that at least half of the people commenting (and all of the people who downvoted you) have over a decade of git muscle memory in their fingers. That's far faster than asking AI, and sometimes probably even faster than their terminal can print.

I promise you nobody is trying to show off. Git's CLI is notoriously inconsistent and verbose, and every GUI for it is always missing a ton of relevant features because it was designed for someone else's itch.

Now we have people like you trying to wedge AI into the discussion. I'm sorry dude. There's nothing to argue here. Git is the most important tool we have as developers. It's worth learning because the whole point is precise changes. We put up with the bad interfaces because it's otherwise just that good.

It's still specialized, but looking it up has gotten easier. It's better to use the right tool for the job. What's next, are you gonna tell ChatGPT to list your files too?

FYI/fwiw Fish shell autocompletes branches sorted by last commit date when writing out git commands. It also provides completions for commitish objects grouped by class, giving precedence to the usual targets first, with each group sorted by its own sort key. Handy!

Every day, I learn a cool new thing that fish can do

Huge fan of `git recent` [0] for this purpose.

[0] - https://github.com/paulirish/git-recent

Spoiler it’s fzf under the hood. But it’s perfect and simple.

The best upgrade to these kinds of git branch scripts is piping them to fzf. I’ve been using this fbr one from the fzf repo. https://github.com/jbranchaud/dotfiles/blob/main/zshrc.local...

I have been using the `git lb` alias suggested by https://ses4j.github.io/2020/04/01/git-alias-recent-branches... (post written April 1st but not a joke) and quite enjoying it. Shows me the last 10 branches I worked on (very easy to edit the alias definition to get more or fewer than 10), sorted by date, most recent first. It's been handy in all sorts of situations, especially because one of our internal libraries needs a bugfix or a new feature every 3 months or so. So every time I cd into that repo, I have no clue what I did last, but `git lb` tells me right away.

Our team's `git branch` output is a graveyard. Sorting by last commit would be a godsend for quickly identifying active work and stale branches.

When I'm working on a repository where the remote is shared (like a corporate GitHub repository where not everyone has their own GitHub fork) I tend to name all my branches like 'eru/<something>'. That way I can quickly find my work, and I can also confidently delete branches without worrying about stepping on other people's toes nor being stepped on by accident. I encourage co-workers to do the same, but haven't strictly required it from team members.

There's a bunch of these good ideas here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43169435

I rarely care about the date of the commit on the branch to determine recency, I care about when I last switched to the branch.

This comment gets it correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49504860

I wrote my own version to do this nearly 10 years ago: https://github.com/amarshall/git-recent-branches

I have been using something like this for 10+ years by this point - still wonder why it is not default or easier to do than a custom gitconfig/alias hack. :P

> Just configure git branch to sort by the last commit date:

> git config branch.sort committerdate

> You can also supply this on a one-off basis as git branch --sort committerdate.

These don't seem like hacks to me. What do you have in mind?

Probably because most of the time you list branches you goal isn't to discover what exists, but to find the specific one you're looking for.

Git defaults are a bit weird. You also have to enable rerere yourself, when it should be on by default.

I love this little fzf bash function that I wrote a few years ago: https://gist.github.com/thomasaarholt/141df779f3f16b641701b4...

It opens a fuzzy finder window showing the branches you have in the repo, sorted by recency. Also shows the latest committer and the date. Hit enter on the one you want to swap to it.

I made a lovely little TUI for this, with Charm (https://charm.sh)

https://github.com/tyre/recent-branches

Enjoy!

Here is a much, much, much lighter weight version I've been using since forever:

    gi() {
        git branch --sort=-committerdate |\
         grep -v '^\*' | cut -d' ' -f3 | fzf |\
         xargs git checkout
    }

fzf handles the TUI part

I wonder about the "modern" git part. Here is how to do it in 2013: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10693888/2361979

How many branches would you need to have to make this worthwhile?

At any time I'm working across 5-30 branches (some when I'm reviewing other folks' code) so it's handy to see my latest branches

I've seen monorepos with over 10k active branches. But even at a smaller scale (10-100 branches), it becomes useful when manually stacking and/or rebasing, especially if you have a smaller terminal.

At my current job it's fairly frequent that I have 5+ active branches open for a repo. Not ideal and that's another topic, but it is nice to be able to sort branches because of that.

I often have a few dozen branches open at work, because I'm often waiting for reviews to go through but don't want to be blocked. I also often run little experiments in the background, like having an AI agent try to reliably reproduce a flake I saw in the CI (and then producing a fix for the reliably reproducer).

Sometimes I’m amazed anyone is willing to live without a git ui. The graph structure git uses is just such a natural fit for visual processing, plus the default git ux is borderline user-hostile until you master it.

What’s also funny is that early in my career I could tell other engineers looked down on me for using a git UI, perhaps assuming I was too stupid to use the terminal. I suspect that this mindset propagates git use to the next generation.

Well, it's a fit for visual processing only in simple cases. If your graph looks like spaghetti, you need other ways to think about it. If the `git log --oneline --graph` view (or whatever options trigger it) is not good enough, then a full-blown GUI won't do it for me either.

When I get worried about my skill set or career going away from LLMs, I get hit with a post like this with huge traction describing something I’ve already found and solved for myself. It makes me realize: I’m probably ok for a while because of all these experiences and knowledge, and I’m quite shit at communicating something that’s obviously valuable to others.

This was one of the better usability changes I made to git, yes you should probably set it for yourself

Such a small quality of life improvement. My `git branch` output is a graveyard sometimes, this would be handy.

TIL Git can do this without a shell script. I’ve been manually sorting through branches like an idiot

I have to make a confession. I've been using different version control system for the last 25 years, but everytime I'm doing anything more complicated than basic commit/push I feel absolutely overwhelmed and terrified that I'm about to break something.

Nice. Will help solve some mysteries on older projects.

yep, i have a little helper in my zshrc for this sort of thing:

alias git-hot-refs="git branch --sort=committerdate | tail"

nice. I made myself pretty much the same command couple years ago but called it 'latestbranches'.

Another useful one if you have a large number of tags and want to see the most recently created ones first:

    git config --global tag.sort -creatordate

(`-creatordate` reverses the sort so that the newest come first.)

Let's sort git branches by quality, better branches towards the top, slop at the bottom.

Or just have `jj log` custom-configured.

It is sorted this way by default.

Amazing what one can learn from rtfm

I just click on tower and open it, much better

Feels like the type of problem you could simply choose to not have in the first place (by not using git).

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