Quick git tip

I recently put the following couple of alias in my ~/.gitconfig file:

[alias]
    dlp = diff ORIG_HEAD..FETCH_HEAD
    llp = log ORIG_HEAD..FETCH_HEAD

These stand for “diff last pull” and “log last pull” respectively. When dealing with third-party submodules in particular, such as my my emacs config where most extra code is contained in submodules, I’ll often just run git pull to update them. After that, either out of curiosity or occasionally afer the fact if I’m tracking down some changed behaviour, I want to know exactly what changed.

So this is what those two aliases accomplish. When you fetch, git creates an extra couple of refs referring to the HEAD before and after the fetch. You can then just use these to examine the new commits via diff and log.

I’m sure they’ve been proposed numerous times in the past, and may even be built-in for all I know, but they’ve been quite useful for me already so you’re welcome to them too!