How to check for changes on remote (origin) Git repository

Question

What are the Git commands to do the following workflow?

Scenario

I cloned from a repository and did some commits of my own to my local reposit

Answer 1

You could git fetch origin to update the remote branch in your repository to point to the latest version. For a diff against the remote:

git diff origin/master

Yes, you can use caret notation as well.

If you want to accept the remote changes:

git merge origin/master

Answer 2

I just use

git remote update
git status

The latter then reports how many commits behind my local is (if any).

Then

git pull origin master

to bring my local up to date :)

Answer 3

I simply use

git fetch origin

to fetch the remote changes, and then I view both local and pending remote commits (and their associated changes) with the nice gitk tool involving the --all argument like:

gitk --all

Answer 4

A good way to have a synthetic view of what's going on "origin" is:

git remote show origin

Answer 5

My regular question is rather "anything new or changed in repo" so whatchanged comes handy. Found it here.

git whatchanged origin/master -n 1

Answer 6

One potential solution

Thanks to Alan Haggai Alavi's solution I came up with the following potential workflow:

Step 1:

git fetch origin

Step 2:

git checkout -b localTempOfOriginMaster origin/master
git difftool HEAD~3 HEAD~2
git difftool HEAD~2 HEAD~1
git difftool HEAD~1 HEAD~0

Step 3:

git checkout master
git branch -D localTempOfOriginMaster
git merge origin/master