Useful VCS commands in VIM

vim_vcs_commands.md

Keyboard Shortcuts for Blame and Show

git blame and git show are useful commands for giving context of the code you're viewing. Since I spend the majority of my time in Vim, they become even more useful if they are executable from inside the editor. Of course, Vim makes this easy by giving a way to call external commands.

Vim (vimrc)

Git

Blame

For git blame, I wanted the ability to either blame the entire file or just part of one. By default, I blame the entire file but take advantage of Vim's visual mode to filter for only the selected lines.

nnoremap <leader>gb :<C-U>!git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| color_git_blame \| less +<C-R>=line("w0") <CR><CR>
vnoremap <leader>gb :<C-U>!git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p \| color_git_blame \| less <CR><CR>

The above assigns <leader>gb (gb => git blame, get it?) to normal and visual modes.

NOTE: I'm using a script called color_blame to colorize the git output. If you're not interested, feel free to remove those sections from the mapping commands

Show

In addition to being able to blame a file, I wanted the ability to get the commit message from the current line.

nnoremap <leader>gl :<C-U>!git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line(".") <CR>p \| awk '{print $1}' \| xargs git show <CR><CR>

Here, <leader>gl will first run git blame to get the sha hash of the current line and pass that to git show to get information specific to that commit.

Subversion

I sometimes find myself working on repositories that are based in subversion. Below are the same commands as above but for svn

nnoremap <leader>sb :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| color_svn_blame \| less +<C-R>=line("w0") <CR><CR>
vnoremap <leader>sb :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p \| color_svn_blame \| less <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>sl :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line(".") <CR>p \| awk '{print $1}' \| xargs svn log -r<CR><CR>

Altogether

nnoremap <leader>gb :<C-U>!git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| color_git_blame \| less +<C-R>=line("w0") <CR><CR>
vnoremap <leader>gb :<C-U>!git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p \| color_git_blame \| less <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>gl :<C-U>!git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line(".") <CR>p \| awk '{print $1}' \| xargs git show <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>sb :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| color_svn_blame \| less +<C-R>=line("w0") <CR><CR>
vnoremap <leader>sb :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p \| color_svn_blame \| less <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>sl :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line(".") <CR>p \| awk '{print $1}' \| xargs svn log -r<CR><CR>

Neovim (init.vim)

In Vim, ! executes an external command. However, because Neovim allows an actual terminal inside the editor, it's best to replace the ! with a call to te.

nnoremap <leader>gb :<C-U>te git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| color_git_blame \| less +<C-R>=line("w0") <CR><CR>
vnoremap <leader>gb :<C-U>te git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p \| color_git_blame \| less <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>gl :<C-U>te git blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line(".") <CR>p \| awk '{print $1}' \| xargs git show <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>sb :<C-U>te svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| color_svn_blame \| less +<C-R>=line("w0") <CR><CR>
vnoremap <leader>sb :<C-U>te svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p \| color_svn_blame \| less <CR><CR>
nnoremap <leader>sl :<C-U>te svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line(".") <CR>p \| awk '{print $1}' \| xargs svn log -r<CR><CR>