this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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Programming

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The git history command deserves more attention (lalitm.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev
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Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so much as sneeze.

jj, an alternative to git, gets discussed a lot these days (1, 2, 3, 4) and is often pitched as a solution. While I’m very sold on the problems jj is trying to solve, the way it solves them hasn’t quite hit home with me. Every 3 months, for the last 1.5 years, I try it out for a few days, really trying to make it part of my workflow but eventually I give up and go back to git.

That’s where git history comes in.

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[–] stsquad@lemmy.ml 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

The last big update to my git workflow was when I discovered --update-refs as it makes maintaining a stack of feature branches much easier. So far I really only have one "main" dev branch and then peel off the sub-branches at they need merging upstream.

However I shall have to investigate how the history commands are exposed in magit. I can see it being useful if you have long held branches that take a while to upstream but are useful to have in your trees.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

You might find topgit useful for maintaining separate interdependent feature branches: https://mackyle.github.io/topgit/topgit.html
https://github.com/mackyle/topgit

It adds some simple commands that manage all of the base and head refs of the branches and automatically propagates merges up the tree when you modify a branch lower down. It has been around for quite a while so it’s fairly stable by now.

Most importantly, it doesn’t do any history rewriting, so you keep the full commit history of your branches while making it easy for other contributors to make commits to the same set of feature branches concurrently.

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 1 points 4 hours ago

Oh, nice! Does this do something like Git Butler where you can have multiple branches "checked out" simultaneously, and keep track of which changes belong to which of those branches as you work? But maybe without the commitment that Git Butler requires to using its tooling?