Git Branch Time

Mar 10, 2012 Created

Heres a small script from Ben Hoskings which is immensely useful. It lists all the branches in your git project ordered by when you last worked on them. It also highlights branches which have not yet been merged into your current branch, which is super useful when looking to prune some branches.

Heres how it looks on the rails repo:

git branch time

From a quick glance at that you can see what has been merged in (gray SHA) and what wasn’t merged into the current branch (yellow SHA with a +). You can also get a good overview of where certain branches stand based off their age.

Heres the gist. (I take no credit for this, but it is useful enough to share)

# .gitconfig
# add this to your ~/.gitconfig under the alias section to allow things like "git brt"
[alias]
  brt = branch-time

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# save to ~/bin/git-branch-time and chmod +x
# Credit to Ben Hoskings - http://benhoskin.gs/

def format_commit_info timestamp, time_desc, commit_id, message, ref_name
  [
    "#{timestamp.strftime("%y %b %d")}, #{timestamp.strftime("%l:%M%p").downcase}",
    "(#{time_desc})",
    commit_id,
    message,
    ref_name
  ]
end

def render_commit_info timestamp, time_desc, commit_id, message, ref_name, merged
  [
    timestamp,
    time_desc,
    "\e[32m#{ref_name}\e[0m",
    (merged ? "  #{commit_id}" : "+ \e[33m#{commit_id}\e[0m"),
    "\e[#{message[/^Temp/] ? 31 : 90}m#{message.strip}\e[0m"
  ].join(' ')
end

commit_info = `git branch #{ARGV.join(' ')} | cut -c 3-`.strip.split("\n").reject {|ref_name|
  ref_name[' -> ']
}.map {|ref_name|
  `git log --no-walk --pretty=format:"%ct\n%cr\n%h\n%s" '#{ref_name}' --`.strip.split("\n").push(ref_name)
}.map {|commit_info|
  [Time.at(commit_info.shift.to_i)].concat(commit_info)
}.sort_by {|commit_info|
  commit_info.first # unix timestamp
}.reverse.map {|commit_info|
  format_commit_info(*commit_info)
}.transpose.map {|column|
  max_col_length = column.sort_by {|i| i.length }.last.length
  column.map {|i| i.ljust(max_col_length) }
}.transpose.map {|commit_info|
  commit_info.push(
    `git merge-base HEAD #{commit_info[2]}`.chomp[0...7] == commit_info[2]
  )
}.each {|commit_info|
  puts render_commit_info(*commit_info)
}

View Gist

After adding that alias you can then go into your project and run git brt or git brt -a to get the listing. It accepts (most) switches you can pass to git branch.