Git commands I run before reading any code
piechowski.io1337 points by grepsedawk 10 hours ago
1337 points by grepsedawk 10 hours ago
Jujutsu equivalents, if anyone is curious:
What Changes the Most
jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & committer_date(after:"1 year ago")' \
-T 'self.diff().files().map(|f| f.path() ++ "\n").join("")' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & ~merges()' \
-T 'self.author().name() ++ "\n"' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & description(regex:"(?i)fix|bug|broken")' \
-T 'self.diff().files().map(|f| f.path() ++ "\n").join("")' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk())' \
-T 'self.committer().timestamp().format("%Y-%m") ++ "\n"' \
| sort | uniq -c
jj log --no-graph \
-r 'ancestors(trunk()) & committer_date(after:"1 year ago") & description(regex:"(?i)revert|hotfix|emergency|rollback")'
To me, it makes jujutsu look like the Nix of VCSes.
Not meaning to offend anyone: Nix is cool, but adds complexity. And as a disclaimer: I used jujutsu for a few months and went back to git. Mostly because git is wired in my fingers, and git is everywhere. Those examples of what jujutsu can do and not git sound nice, but in those few months I never remotely had a need for them, so it felt overkill for me.
It's the dvorak of git... Maybe more efficient but incompatible with everyone else and a very loud vocal minority.
You can find this pattern again and again. How many redditors say 120fps is essential for gaming or absolutely require a mechanical keyboard?
I mean let's not be hasty. Mechanical keyboards used to be just normal keyboards before they got enshitified.
I don't even like using "natural" keyboards despite the ergonomic advantage because it ruins my muscle memory when I'm on the (much more prevalent) "regular" keyboard.
It's totally compatible though, and that's a big selling point. I use jj and nobody else at my work uses it and that has never been an issue.
Tbf you wouldn't use/switch to jj for (because of) those kind of commands, and are quite the outlier in the grand list of reasons to use jj. However the option to use the revset language in that manner is a high-ranking reason to use jj in my opinion.
The most frequent "complex" command I use is to find commits in my name that are unsigned, and then sign them (this is owing to my workflow with agents that commit on my behalf but I'm not going to give agents my private key!)
jj log -r 'mine() & ~signed()'
# or if yolo mode...
jj sign -r 'mine() & ~signed()'
Actually, signing was one of the annoying parts of jujutsu for me: I sign with a security key, and the way jujutsu handled signing was very painful to me (I know it can be configured and I tried a few different ways, but it felt inherent to how jujutsu handles commits (revisions?)).
The only reasonable way to use signing in jj is with the sign-on-push config https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#automatically-signing... rather than as commits are made
Why? I have my signing behavior set to own and I haven't noticed any issues, but I don't actually rely on signatures for much.
If you need to type in a password to unlock your keychain (e.g. default behavior for gpg-agent), then signing commits one at a time constantly is annoying.
Does "own" try to sign working copy snapshot commits too? That would greatly increase the number and frequency of signatures.
Ah, I use my SSH key to sign my commits and I don't have a password on my SSH key.
> Does "own" try to sign working copy snapshot commits too?
Yes
No, jj is super simple in daily use, in contrast with git that is a constant chore (and any sane person use alias). This include stuff that in git is a total mess of complexity like dealing with rebases. So not judge the tool for this odd case.
I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages. I can’t even remember most git flags, I’m ecstatic when I remember how to iterate over arrays in “jq”, I can’t fathom how people remember these types of syntaxes.
I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.
At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.
That said, the OP's commands are useful, I am copying them (because obviously I won't ever memorize them).
> I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.
I wrote a cheat sheet in my notes of common commands, until they stuck in my head and I haven't needed it now for a decade or more. I also lean heavily on aliases and "self-documenting" things in my .bashrc file. Curious how others handle it. A search every time I need to do something would be too much friction for me to stand.
I refuse to have alises and other custom commands. Either it is useful for everyone and so I make a change to the upstream project (I have never done this), or it won't exist next time I change my system so there is no point. I do have some custom tools that I am working on that haven't been released yet, but the long term goal is either delete them or release them to more people who will use them so I know it will be there next time I use a different system.
I just use Claude Code as a terminal for git these days. It writes up better commit messages than I would write anyway. No more "git commit -m fix"
indeed, I held off for a while but finally caved because I got sick of seeing commits with `git commit -m .` littered in there. These are personal projects so I'm the only one dev-ing on them, but still so nice to have commit messages.
I just use my ide integrations for git. I absolutely love the way pycharm/jetbrains does it, and I'm starting to be ok with how vscode does. Remembering git commands besides the basics is just pointless. If I need to do something that the gui doesn't handle, I'll look it up and put it in a script.
> At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.
Yes! We mostly wouldn’t tolerate the complexity and the terrible UX of a tool we use everyday--but there's enough Stockholm Syndrome out there where most of us are willing to tolerate it.
I’ve recently been looking into some tools that provide quick or painless help like pop up snippets with descriptions and cheat sheets, got any recommendations?
Navi is good for generating personal cheatsheets:
https://github.com/denisidoro/navi
But for Git, I can't recommend lazygit enough. It's an incredible piece of software:
I don't, I will google things and fiddle, then put it in a git alias (with a comment on what it does and / or where I got it from) and push it to my private dotfiles repo, taking it with me between computers and projects.
jj's template and revset languages are very simple syntactically, so once you're comfortable with the few things you do use often it's just a question of learning about the other existing functions (even if only enough to know to look them up), which slot right in and compose well with everything else you know (unlike flags which typically have each their own system).
Or, perhaps better yet, defining your own functions/helpers as you go for things you might care about, which, by virtue of having been named you, are much easier to remember (and still compose nicely).
You research it once, use it and then remember that it has "ancestor" in the command somewhere and then use ctrl + R to dig up something from your shell history.
> I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages.
We can't.
Why do you think the `man` command exists?
Some things are idioms that one repeats so often they just stick, e.g. I use "grep.... | cut -c x-y | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr" to quickly grep frequency of some events from a log file.
Don't feel bad - no one remembers them all, we just remember a few idioms we use...
If I look something up twice, I record it in Obsidian. If I need it more than a couple of times, I'll probably make an alias, a script or a mask [1] file. Autocomplete and autosuggest are essential to my workflow. And good history search.
Nobody does. One person figures it out, then writes a blog post, and we all Google for it. Even git’s man pages are long and sometimes cryptic.
Yeah especially with git. All I know is pull, add, commit, push. Everything else I have to look up.
You add them into your GIT config file as shortcuts?
If you have multiple machines (/must have), just apply your user config to current machine?
If you don't have to codedive new projects all the time, there's zero reason to memorize these. If your job is to look at new codebases all the time, you probably learn to remember these commands pretty quickly.
a project isn’t dying because of no commits. Rather it’s stable
I often feel I need to setup bots to make superfluous commits just to make it look like my useful and stable repos are “active”
One example (not mine) a a qr-code generator library. Hasn’t been updated in 10 years. It’s perfect as is. It just provides the size and the bits. You convert those bits to any representation you want. It has no need to be updated
In a real company? A private codebase at a minimum should still be getting regular security patching and dependency updates. Always eventually one of those updates requires some level of refactor. If I see a project with no commits, I run away.
It's rare, I think, for a project to have such a well defined and singular purpose that has not changed in 10 years nor have any bugs been discovered or its dependencies changed underneath it.
It's not impossible, of course, but if I saw even a qr library that hadn't changed in 10 years I would worry that it wouldn't build on current systems (due to dependencies) and that nobody was actually using it (due to lag of bug reports).
I have several of those projects. I avoid dependencies as much as possible, striving to only use things which I know ship with my target OS. I code for a level of correctness and longevity. That benefits everyone, including myself.
A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.
> A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.
I agree with you - and yet the barcode library I used recently for a variable-data-printing project was last updated 13 hours ago, despite having been around since 2008!
Well said. Even an awesome library with no bugs that has no external dependencies still depends on the stdlib. For a while, before we were using containers, we even had the issue on Mac dev machines especially, where a half dozen Rubygems would crash while building its C extensions if your Mac OS version wasn’t just what the author expected, due to changes in the compiler shipped by Apple. So a MacOS major update might on its own functionally break a gem, even if the gem itself was designed well and you were using the same Ruby version.
This might be true for libraries or utilities that have a well-defined scope and no dependencies, but that's not what the article is focused on. When considering a company's main product, it's usually never done and patterns of activity—and especially changes in those patterns—can give you insight into potential issues.
> a project isn’t dying because of no commits. Rather it’s stable
Agreed. Assuming there are no open issues and PRs. When I find a project, if the date of the last commit is old, I next look at the issues and PRs. If there are simple-to-deal-with issues (e.g. a short question or spam) and easy-to-merge PRs (e.g. fixing a typo in the README) which have been left lingering for years, it’s probably abandoned. Looking at the maintainer’s GitHub activity graph should provide more clues.
> I often feel I need to setup bots to make superfluous commits just to make it look like my useful and stable repos are “active”
I have never done it, but a few times thought about making a “maintenance” release to bump the version number and release date, especially since I often use a variant of calendar versioning.
I don't want to program git, I want to get stuff done so I would reject using that tool and do what the article author did running tried and true pipeable Linux/UNIX commands. It's also the same reason why I dislike Gradle and use Maven, I don't want to program my build I want to define and run my build.
But the git commands in the article is also programming of the same kind, just using more terse, more obscure language. All the shell pipelines are sort, uniq, and grep.
A language that properly maps to the data model, and has readable identifiers is a boon. Git is a database, a database needs a proper query language.
I can't remember all of this, does anyone know of any LLM model trained on CLI which can be run locally?
If you copy those commands into a file and use that file to prompt the “sh” LLM.
That works until you need a small variation of any of these commands and you’re lost.
Hah someone really looked at jq (?) and thought: "yes, more of this everywhere". I feel jq is like marmite (edit: aka vegemite, i.e. "you either love it or you hate it")
It doesn't seem any more egregious than something like:
`git log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --`
Which is something I see a lot of people alias in Git for viewing logs.
It's really not that bad, although the jq comparison might be apt. You have such primitives you need to understand, and then everything just fits together nicely. I find this much easier to write and understand than git's cryptic format strings.
Disclaimer: I love jq too :)
I love how the author thinks developers write commit messages.
All joking aside, it really is a chronic problem in the corporate world. Most codebases I encounter just have "changed stuff" or "hope this works now".
It's a small minority of developers (myself included) who consider the git commit log to be important enough to spend time writing something meaningful.
AI generated commit messages helps this a lot, if developers would actually use it (I hope they will).
And in a squash and merge workflow, which are most teams I've been on the past 8 years, it really is the title of the pull request or merge request. That is what really matters.
And I really like that because it leaves room to let the developer do whatever kind of commit messages they want to that makes sense to them. Because nobody's really ever going to read those again after it squashed and merged.
- fix - fix fr - fix frfr - plz - omg why - never gonna give you up - never gonna let you down - add missing curly braces
This is a team lead/CTO problem. A good leader will be explicit in their expectations that developers write good commit messages. I've certainly had good leaders that expect this.
Yes, and a culture problem, too. I guess I've been blessed that I've mostly only worked for "grown up" companies, but I've never encountered a workplace where people didn't write useful commit messages. At least one line description of the work done, but often multiple lines of valuable context. Only the junior devs had to be told to do it, but once they got into the habit, everyone understood why we do it and it was no big deal.
If I joined a company where people committed their code with "stuff" or "made some changes" or "asdfhlfo;ejfo;ae," that would be a red flag that I might have joined the wrong company, and I'd start to wonder what else the developers here do carelessly.
The same goes for code comments though people are much more vocal about their disdain. It's ironic given how frequent AI is used to generate docs. But docs are much better written by the person who wrote the code, the person who has all the context.
These things never take much time but people dismiss them because of that. Because each commit and each comment in isolation isn't very valuable but they are very helpful in aggregate. I'm not sure why this bias exists though, since the same is true for lines of code. It's also true about a ton of things. All the little things add up. Just because it's little now doesn't mean it's not important
Indeed. If you can't spend two minutes (MAX) writing a sentence or two explaining what the commit is for, then what are we doing as developers? Commits are for future you and your future team. They are a tool. Please, use them.
Good commit messages would be nice but honestly I would be over the moon if our pull requests would be approved within a week without having to ping one or more people.
Some of my favorite are the perhaps well-meaning but totally misguided log of what files they changed.
I once tutored an intern. Who thought he was The Best Programmer On Earth (didn't we all at that age?). He refused to use revision control, it slowed him down.
So we told him to commit at least once every day, with a relevant commit message, or else fail his internship.
He worked 21 more days. There were 21 commits: "17:00, time to go home".
This reads like the intern was left to his own devices and his output not checked at all for three weeks straight. Actual tutoring would have surfaced the issue after 1 or 2 days tops.
I think it's a stretch to measure leadership quality on something so minor, a lot of teams find them pretty useless no matter how good they are.
I don't agree. These things actually matter. A developer who isn't told otherwise is just going to do whatever they feel like, so if there is nothing or no-one enforcing the standards, then the failure isn't on the individual developer, it is on the team lead. Someone needs to be setting the standards.
In the company I work for, there is a team that has isolated itself to some extent from other teams and works at a furious pace to keep their particular section of the business happy. We're lucky enough that they spun up their own repo to do their work on, so they don't actually impact other teams, but if the quality of the commit messages is anything to go by, I am 100% certain they're going to end up in a huge mess, if they aren't already. The team lead encourages this, and certainly doesn't care about commit messages etc.
Developers who care about other developers tend to write better quality code, because they care what other developers think of them. If you care about other developers, you will most likely write decent quality commit messages too.
I have seen over many years the types of developers who only care about moving their own code into production as fast as possible and getting to the next thing. There is a very high correlation with a mess at the end, which they inevitably won't have to tidy up because they'll be doing the next thing. These types of developers hate owning stuff in production, so they don't do it, so they don't actually care how maintainable their "clever" code is. I am very certain that a number of people reading this will be those types of developers.
Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish? This is invaluable to me as long as commit messages are clear.
As a manager, one of the first things I do is make sure that the PR titles (the PR text becomes the commit messages in squash-merging workflows) at minimum begin with a ticket number. Then we can later read both the intention and the commentary on it.
> Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish?
Personally no, the code is the "truth". If I need more I'm going to open a dialog with the author, not spend time trying to interpret a 7 word commit message, "good" or otherwise.
The code can only convey what is being done (and then, in some cases, only superficially). It can't convey what decisions were made, what alternatives were discarded, what business motivations may have led to that code.
And for old enough code, the author may not be available, or more likely doesn't remember.
Fine, but none of that is in a normal commit message, lets be real...
Which circles back to why it's important for leadership to tackle this
Yes, but not in the form of commit messages, the parent comment described things better suited to jira tickets, documentation etc.
It feels like we're trying really hard to stretch the utility of commit messages here...