How do I see the commit differences between branches in git?

Question

I\'m on branch-X and have added a couple more commits on top of it. I want to see all the differences between MASTER and the branch that I am on in terms of commits. I could

Answer 1

If you are on Linux, gitg is way to go to do it very quickly and graphically.

If you insist on command line you can use:

git log --oneline --decorate

To make git log nicer by default, I typically set these global preferences:

git config --global log.decorate true
git config --global log.abbrevCommit true

Answer 2

You can get a really nice, visual output of how your branches differ with this

git log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative master..branch-X

Answer 3

I think it is matter of choice and context.I prefer to use

git log origin/master..origin/develop --oneline --no-merges

It will display commits in develop which are not in master branch.

If you want to see which files are actually modified use

git diff --stat origin/master..origin/develop --no-merges

If you don't specify arguments it will display the full diff. If you want to see visual diff, install meld on linux, or WinMerge on windows. Make sure they are the default difftools .Then use something like

git difftool -y origin/master..origin/develop --no-merges

In case you want to compare it with current branch. It is more convenient to use HEAD instead of branch name like use:

git fetch
git log origin/master..HEAD --oneline --no-merges

It will show you all the commits, about to be merged

Answer 4

#! /bin/bash
if ((2==$#)); then
  a=$1
  b=$2
  alog=$(echo $a | tr '/' '-').log
  blog=$(echo $b | tr '/' '-').log
  git log --oneline $a > $alog
  git log --oneline $b > $blog
  diff $alog $blog
fi

Contributing this because it allows a and b logs to be diff'ed visually, side by side, if you have a visual diff tool. Replace diff command at end with command to start visual diff tool.