git time lapsed view

[epage]

Perforce's time lapsed view makes it easy to browse the history of code both to find additions and deletions

• https://www.perforce.com/video-tutorials/vcs/using-time-lapse-view
• https://www.perforce.com/manuals/p4v/Content/P4V/advanced_files.timelapse.html

My problems with git blame

• Having to switch which commit I'm doing the blame for to get past refactors to the actual change I care about
  • Updating the path when handling a move
• Not being able to identify when code was removed

So far, I've not seen a git gui that has blame support that seems useful.

I was thinking that a TUI focused purely on the blame case would be useful

• Syntax highlight the code
• Views
  • Blame
  • Incremental diff
  • Ranged diff
• Highlight blame sections by age
• For blame column, only show tag for release introduced (falling back to date if there isn't one between then and now)
  • More detail is available in the bottom pane
• Show line numbers
• A slider
  • Focus on tags and merge-commits, allowing to browse further in when needed
  • Slide through moves
• A viewer of ignored commits (with summaries)
• Ability to add ignored commits

[epage]

Relevant git blame tools

• https://www.syntevo.com/deepgit/ (tries to do blames across code moves within files)
• https://www.git-tower.com/help/guides/commit-history/blame/windows (seems pretty basic)
• https://jonas.github.io/tig/doc/manual.html (sounds basic)

Unknown

• Git Kraken
• LazyGit

[epage]

git blame is implemented at https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/blame.c which could be important if we want to implement "when was something removed".

In the mean time, we could just use git2's blame support: https://docs.rs/git2/latest/git2/struct.Repository.html#method.blame_file

[epage]

Should we integrate pickaxe support? https://tekin.co.uk/2020/11/patterns-for-searching-git-revision-histories?utm_source=Reddit

[epage]

Word blame support? https://framagit.org/mdamien/git-word-blame/

[epage]

git spelunk seems like a more limited form: https://github.com/osheroff/git-spelunk

• Highlights other chunks from the same time
• Uses [ and ] to move forward/backwards

[epage]

Naming:

Themes

• Find root cause
• Deep dive

[epage]

See https://github.com/epage/git-dive/issues