#Git visualize branches command line full#

#Git visualize branches command line full#

If you give it some reference to another commit, ala git branch foo ab41f2, then it just resolves that full hash and sticks those 40 characters in the new 'foo' text file in the heads folder. When you say git branch foo, all it's doing in that moment is making a foo text file in that folder and sticking the hash of the commit you're currently on in it, and that's your new branch. git/refs/heads, and stick that hash in it (no whitespace - just the 40 characters), save it, and do git log -all -graph -decorate -oneline, and you'll see that branch in the graph of branches. In fact, you can grab the hash of any commit, make a text file named 'awesome' in. There are no other things that make up a branch. It has 40 characters in it, which are the hash of the commit considered to be the current head of the master branch.

Here is a particular path in any git-versioned project. They're just a convenience for you to name the tips - called 'heads' - of various lines of development in the commit graph.

Bad idea.īranches are not a special thing in git at all. Tracking branch hierarchies is hugely limiting, and would prevent all of this, or would leave you with lies everywhere in your commits about which branch things were supposed to have been on.

I've even zippered separate commits by pretty-printing out the hashes and commit unix epoch times, sorting on the times, then doing a batch cherry-picking on a 3rd branch to pull in and interleave two separate lines of development that I wanted to make a single branch. I've also unzippered commits with back-to-back rebases, so abbababba, where a and b are commits with concerns about 2 different topics becomes two branches with aaaa and bbbbb commits. I do all manner of expert-level surgery every day, changing my mind about branch names and just swapping in new names and removing the old ones, or realizing as I'm making the third commit on a topic that I should be doing this on a feature branch, and just finishing the commit, then doing git branch feature to drop a feature branch down at that point, then git reset -hard to back master up 3 commits. There is nothing keeping track of what branch you were on when you created the branch because that's a bit hard to track