At this rate I am going to re-write the entire git manual on this site, but I promise these are only my shortcuts and reminders.

So I was struggling the other day with tags being out of sync with code commits. Seeing the push history was part of my debugging.

So how to get a nice, human-readable log? Try this:

$ git log --pretty=format:"%h - %an, %ar : %s"
b6e6d1a - andrewjstevens, 25 hours ago : Helpful commit message
8ccf650 - andrewjstevens, 2 days ago : Another useful message I wont hate later
1bc5c41 - andrewjstevens, 9 days ago : Something insightful

Want it in colour with some extra formatting? Give this a go:

$ git log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit