Today I Learned: Exploring Git history

For a long time my most favourite way of looking at Git history has been this long command.

$ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --all

All this while it worked very well, but the one annoyance I noticed is that --all actually displays everything. Admittedly this is expected, but in some cases not really desirable.

In situations when there are multiple remotes configured and one of these remotes has a long-running branch I don’t really care about the command would not be helpful at all.

Turns out if I read the man page carefully, I could have avoided the issue by simply using --branches instead of --all. That will only display local branches in the graph.

The commits that get displayed will still have annotations about remote branches that end at that commit, so the context is still there.