Github-like working directory history

git-working-history

#!/bin/bash

FILES=`git ls-tree --name-only HEAD .`
MAXLEN=0
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for f in $FILES; do
    if [ ${#f} -gt $MAXLEN ]; then
        MAXLEN=${#f}
    fi
done
for f in $FILES; do
    str=$(git log -1 --pretty=format:"%C(green)%cr%Creset %x09 %C(cyan)%h%Creset %s %C(yellow)(%cn)%Creset" $f)
    printf "%-${MAXLEN}s -- %s\n" "$f" "$str"
done

A couple of small tweaks could make this run substantially faster for non-trivial directories. I'd recommend:

• Drop --decorate. You're not actually using the results from that, you're just paying the performance cost. On my machine removing --decorate takes the process from ~100ms to ~40ms
• Combine your git log commands into one. You're running two, as far as I can see, so that you can format some whitespace in. That's not necessary; %x09 will print a tab

My version would look like this:

#!/bin/bash

FILES=`git ls-tree --name-only HEAD .`
MAXLEN=0
for f in $FILES; do
    if [ ${#f} -gt $MAXLEN ]; then
        MAXLEN=${#f}
    fi
done
for f in $FILES; do
    str=$(git log -1 --pretty=format:"%C(green)%cr%Creset %x09 %C(cyan)%h%Creset %s %C(yellow)(%cn)%Creset" $f)
    printf "%-${MAXLEN}s -- %s\n" "$f" "$str"
done

For a directory with 29 files, these changes reduce the execution time for the script from ~5.6s to ~1.2s.

Thank you @bturner, that's very helpful!
I wish gist notified me of your comment months ago

It would probably be useful to commit this as an executable file, rather than force the downloader to change permissions on it (and thus have a dirty local copy).

I also noticed that tabbing gets messed up if you have a combination of file that were edited, say "3 years, 3 months ago" and some that were edited "3 years ago". Would be cool to either round the dates if older than a year ago, or add an option to print the dates as a datestamp, rather than relative.

Other than those minor annoyances, this is exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much for posting it!

@coldcandor sorry for the late response, but gist doesn't send out notifications :(

For the spacing, I agree it can be improved, I just admittedly never spent too much time on this.

I'll think of making this a full-fledged utility, rather than a gist, thanks for the feedback.

I've modified this:
https://github.com/mzavoloka/gitls

change /bin/bash to /bin/sh for portability
change echo -en to printf for portability and functionality (most echo implementations don't support -e)
change the use of backticks to $() to be consistent.