Is there a quick way to “git diff” from the point or branch origin?

Question

I have looked at various SO answers on using git diff and git revisions (HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, etc.) and I still haven\'t found an easy way to list the c

Answer 1

For diffs, you want the three-dot notation. If your branch is called dev and it branched from master:

% git diff master...dev

For log, you want the two-dot notation:

% git log master..dev

The revision syntax r1..r2 (with two dots) means "everything reachable from r2 (inclusive) but not reachable from r1 (inclusive)". The normal way to use this is to think of r1 and r2 as specifying a range in a sequence of commits (r1 exclusive, r2 inclusive), so if you have 10 revisions, 3..7 will show you changes 4, 5, 6, and 7. It's {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7} minus {1, 2, 3}. But r1 doesn't necessarily have to be an ancestor of r2. Think of it more like a set operation where r1 represents the entire ancestry from r1 backwards, and r2 represents the entire ancestry from r2 backwards, and you're subtracting the first set from the second set.

So then:

git log master..dev

is the entire history of the branch minus the entire history of master. In other words, just the branch.