View the change history of a file using Git versioning

Question

How can I view the change history of an individual file in Git, complete details with what has changed?

I have got as far as:

git log -- [filename]
         


        

Answer 1

If you prefer to stay text-based, you may want to use tig.

Quick Install:

• apt-get: # apt-get install tig
• Homebrew (OS X): $ brew install tig

Use it to view history on a single file: tig [filename]
Or browse detailed repo history: tig

Similar to gitk but text based. Supports colors in terminal!

Answer 2

You can use vscode with GitLens, it's a very powerful tool. After installed GitLens, go to GitLens tab, select FILE HISTORY and you can browse it.

Answer 3

To show what revision and author last modified each line of a file:

git blame filename

or if you want to use the powerful blame GUI:

git gui blame filename

Answer 4

Summary of other answers after reading through them and playing a bit:

The usual command line command would be

git log --follow --all -p dir/file.c

But you can also use either gitk (gui) or tig (text-ui) to give much more human-readable ways of looking at it.

gitk --follow --all -p dir/file.c

tig --follow --all -p dir/file.c

Under debian/ubuntu, the install command for these lovely tools is as expected :

sudo apt-get install gitk tig

And I'm currently using:

alias gdf='gitk --follow --all -p'

so that I can just type gdf dir to get a focussed history of everything in subdirectory dir.

Answer 5

Lately I discovered tig and found it very useful. There are some cases I'd wish it does A or B but most of the time it's rather neat.

For your case, tig <filename> might be what you're looking for.

http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/

Answer 6

You can use

git log -p filename

to let git generate the patches for each log entry.

See

git help log

for more options - it can actually do a lot of nice things :) To get just the diff for a specific commit you can

git show HEAD 

or any other revision by identifier. Or use

gitk

to browse the changes visually.