Grep full history

[borekb]

It would be nice to be able to grep the full Git history. I'm not sure how to best do it but these Git commands provide close to what I would be after:

$ git log -S"search string"
$ git log -G"search\ string"
$ git rev-list --all | xargs git grep "search string"

Some related Stack Overflow QAs:

• How to grep (search) committed code in the git history?
• github - Search all of Git history for a string?

[eamodio]

@borekb can you try out the latest GitLens v6 alpha? I've implemented the first two and I don't think I can implement the last (since xargs isn't platform agnostic)

Please follow these instructions to install a pre-release. Let me know if you experience any issues -- thanks!

[borekb]

Nice! I tried it and it worked great. Some feedback:

1. The "hint" text in the search field should be updated with the info about ~ (and maybe also =; what's the difference between the two?)

2. I wonder if there could be a better way to preview the change with my search string. Say that I search for "unicorn", it finds all commits with "unicorn" fine but each commit is a long list of files and it's hard to tell in which the change happened.

I don't have a good suggestion, maybe the search could open a sidebar and clicking a commit there would open a diff editor with the change, I really don't know, but as "v1" of this feature, I'm already happy what it does. Thank you!

[eamodio]

As the hint text is already so long, I didn't want to try to squeeze in the new search options.

As for the search results in another view if you feel that this is needed please open a new issue specifically for that.

Thanks!

[borekb]

Thanks. I still wonder how <message>, ~<regex> and =<regex> differ? Maybe pointers to Git documentation would be useful in the README.

[eamodio]

I will add the following to the README

• Adds a Search Commits command (gitlens.showCommitSearch) with a shortcut of alt+/ to search for commits by message, author, file(s), commit id, or code changes
  • Use <message> to search for commits with messages that match <message> -- See Git docs
  • Use @<name> to search for commits with authors that match <name> -- See Git docs
  • Use :<pattern> to search for commits with file names that match <pattern> -- See Git docs
  • Use #<sha> to search for a commit with id of <sha> -- See Git docs
  • Use ~<regex> to search for commits with differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex> -- See Git docs
  • Use =<regex> to search for commits with differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified string (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file -- See Git docs

[github-actions]

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