Sort branches by last commit date

(ryangreenberg.com)

67 points | by speckx 5 days ago

10 comments

  • asb 3 hours ago
    Even better (IMHO!) is `git config branch.sort -committerdate` (note the `-`). This will sort newest committer date first.
    • nulltrace 47 minutes ago
      Rebase an old branch and it suddenly looks recent again. The rewritten tip gets a fresh committer date.
      • quuxplusone 11 minutes ago
        Yes. This is what one wants, since if you have recently rebased it, you're clearly doing work with it. Meanwhile, branches you don't care to touch sink to the bottom of the list.
    • mmsc 1 hour ago
      `git config --global branch.sort -committerdate`
    • pkaodev 3 hours ago
      I have this as an alias in my .zshrc!! Very handy
  • ComputerGuru 3 hours ago
    FYI/fwiw Fish shell autocompletes branches sorted by last commit date when writing out git commands. It also provides completions for commitish objects grouped by class, giving precedence to the usual targets first, with each group sorted by its own sort key. Handy!
  • metmac 2 hours ago
    Huge fan of `git recent` [0] for this purpose.

    [0] - https://github.com/paulirish/git-recent

    • metmac 2 hours ago
      Spoiler it’s fzf under the hood. But it’s perfect and simple.
  • tomtom1337 2 hours ago
    I love this little fzf bash function that I wrote a few years ago: https://gist.github.com/thomasaarholt/141df779f3f16b641701b4...

    It opens a fuzzy finder window showing the branches you have in the repo, sorted by recency. Also shows the latest committer and the date. Hit enter on the one you want to swap to it.

  • mcdow 40 minutes ago
    yep, i have a little helper in my zshrc for this sort of thing:

    alias git-hot-refs="git branch --sort=committerdate | tail"

  • zahlman 2 hours ago
    How many branches would you need to have to make this worthwhile?
    • jamietanna 2 hours ago
      At any time I'm working across 5-30 branches (some when I'm reviewing other folks' code) so it's handy to see my latest branches
    • spike021 1 hour ago
      At my current job it's fairly frequent that I have 5+ active branches open for a repo. Not ideal and that's another topic, but it is nice to be able to sort branches because of that.
    • woodruffw 2 hours ago
      I've seen monorepos with over 10k active branches. But even at a smaller scale (10-100 branches), it becomes useful when manually stacking and/or rebasing, especially if you have a smaller terminal.
  • monster_truck 2 hours ago
    I just click on tower and open it, much better
  • bewareofscams 3 hours ago
    Or just have `jj log` custom-configured.
  • jeffbee 38 minutes ago
    Feels like the type of problem you could simply choose to not have in the first place (by not using git).
  • woodruffw 2 hours ago
    Another useful one if you have a large number of tags and want to see the most recently created ones first:

        git config --global tag.sort -creatordate
    
    (`-creatordate` reverses the sort so that the newest come first.)