Re: Replicating the default "git log" format with a format string.

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 12:55:53AM +0000, Kannan Goundan wrote:

> For our workflow, author dates aren't very useful.  I'm looking for a way to
> configure Git so that "git log" shows commit dates instead of author dates.
>  "--pretty=fuller" gets me almost what I want, but I'd like to avoid the
> extra two lines if possible.
> 
> I tried achieving this by putting a custom format string in ~/.gitconfig:
> 
> [format]
>   pretty = "%C(auto,yellow)commit %C(auto)%H\nAuthor: %an <%ae>\nDate:  
> %cd\n\n%w(0,4,4)%B"
> 
> This works pretty well, but has a few corner cases.  When you do "git log
> --decorate", the default format decorates commits with ref names.  I can add
> "%d" to my format string, but then the ref names show up all the time, even
> without "--decorate".
> 
> The "--walk-reflogs" option presents a similar problem.  The %g*
> placeholders all become empty strings when "--walk-reflogs" isn't present,
> which is sort of what I want, but it leaves extra blank lines in the output.
> 
> Is it possible to exactly replicate the default "git log" format with a
> format string?

Sadly, no, I don't think it is possible with the current format
specifiers. It would be nice if it was, though.

-Peff