← Back to context

Comment by triceratops

5 years ago

> I can confidently say that in 25 years in this industry this isn't something I've encountered.

I've been in the industry less than half that time and it's happened to me. blame will tell you the last person/commit to touch that line of code. To find out when it was originally written, I may have to (in some cases) manually binary search the history of the file.

6 comments

triceratops

Reply
nemetroid  5 years ago

If you're a CLI user, you should check out tig, which is a terminal UI for git. In the blame view, you can select a line and press "," to go to the blame view for the parent of the commit blamed for that line.

This lets you quickly traverse through the history of a file. Another good tool for digging into the history is the -S flag to "git log", which finds commits that added or removed a certain string (there's -G that searches for a regex, too).

SassyGrapefruit  5 years ago

why? Just go to the commit hash in the blame and run blame again.

All in all it has a negligible impact on the readability of the code. It's mostly aesthetic for me. It's ugly and only solves far fetched problems.

Do you scratch your name and SSN into the side of your car? What if your title blows away in the wind on the same day that city hall burns down destroying all ownership records?

  • richardxia  5 years ago

    Was going to post the exact same thing. I make use of this repeated git blame method all the time, and for everyone who is just learning this for the first time, you'll actually want to write `git blame <commit>~` to go back one commit from the commit hash in the blame, because otherwise you'll still get the same results on the line you're looking at.

    Also, if you're using GitHub, their Blame view also a button that looks like a stack of rectangles between the commit information and the code. Clicking that will essentially do the same thing command-line git operation above.