How do I view the latest commits of a remote Git repository without making a clone first?

Question

I want to get a list of the latest commits on a certain remote Git repository. However, I do not want to create a clone because that takes too long.

With SVN, I can

Answer 1

You can fetch from the remote repository. This does not merge the changes into your local code, but is represented locally by a branch for the remote repository, with the latest commits.

I.e., you can see individual commits to the remote repository and even cherry-pick single commits if you want.