Adding `git hist` alias that shows you the history of a directory or a file

git_hist_command.md

To create a git hist alias in your Bash profile that:

1. prints the history of the whole directory if no arguments are specified, and
2. if a file or directory is specified, it shows the history of that,

you can add the following lines to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file:

# define a Bash function called git hist
git hist() {
  # checks if there are no command-line arguments
  if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all
    # if there are no arguments, it shows the history of the whole directory
  else
    git log --oneline --decorate --graph "$@"
    # if there are arguments, it shows the history of the specified file or directory.
  fi
}

After adding these lines to your Bash profile, save the file, and either restart your terminal or run source ~/.bash_profile (or source ~/.bashrc) to apply the changes.

Now, you can use git hist to view the history of the whole directory. And git hist <file> or git hist <directory> to view the history of a specific file or directory.

To include the author's name in the git log output, you can use the --pretty option to specify a custom format.

git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all --pretty=format:"%h %d %s (%an)"

This will display the commit hash, branch/tag decorations, commit message, author's name for each commit in the Git log.

• %h: Short commit hash.
• %d: Decorations (branch and tag names).
• %s: Commit message.
• (%an): Author's name in parentheses.

To find author date and time, you can pass in additional formatting parameters:

git log --oneline --decorate --graph --all --pretty=format:"%h %d %s (%an) %ad"

The param %ad is used to include the author date in the format and the date and time will be in the format defined by your Git configuration.