New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
There are several tools to review history with git in a shell. I guess I've never really thought about the "right" way to do it (I should refer to https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 and look this up) but I generally use `git log --oneline | less` and `git blame`. That shows commit history, which is often too broad if you're doing "forensics" on a single file, but git allows for better granularity with the double-dash syntax, such as `git log -- path/to/file` and a few other tricks. I don't worry so much about forking and branching and things like that, because at work we rebase all commits to a common trunk, so the branches and deviations are more or less self-contained in each branch that got merged. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't really use GUI stuff for versioning forensics either, but I do intend to give it a go.
Gitk is a nice little viewer. I didn't cover it in this article because it is *only* a viewer, but it's a nice one to have...which is convenient, since it comes included with a standard git install. And yes, I agree: it's quite nice that gitk has been written such that its functions are available via its GUI or from a unix shell.