Looking at the Log

Every commit you make goes into a list, and git log is how you read it. Newest first, one entry per commit, going back to the beginning of the project.

This is the payoff for Chapter 2's insistence on writing real messages. A log full of "fix" is a list of things you did and cannot remember; a log of plain sentences is a description of how the project got here.

The default view

git log

Each entry shows four things — a long identifier, an author, a date, and the message:

commit a3f9c21b7e5d4c8f2a1b6e9d0c3f7a5b8e2d4c60
Author: Your Name <you@example.com>
Date:   Thu Aug 14 09:12:44 2026 +0200

    Fix the meeting time on the home page

Those four things are exactly the four questions from the first page of this book. What changed is one command away, when and who are printed here, and why is the message you wrote.

Getting out of the pager

If the history is longer than the screen, Git hands the output to a pager — a small program for reading long text. The terminal appears to stop responding, which is the single most common "Git has frozen" moment in a beginner's first week.

It has not frozen. Press Space or the arrow keys to move, and press q to quit. That is all there is to it, and it applies to every Git command that produces a lot of output.

The identifier

That forty-character string is the commit's name, called a hash. It is generated from the commit's own contents, which is why every commit has a different one.

You will never type all forty characters. The first seven are enough to identify a commit in any project you are likely to work on, and that is what every command in this book accepts:

git show a3f9c21

One thing to unlearn immediately: a hash is not a version number. a3f9c21 tells you nothing about whether it came before or after 9e2b70f. Order comes from the chain of commits, which is what the log is printing.

Making it readable

The full view is thorough and unwieldy. This is the one you will actually use:

git log --oneline

c8d1e07 Fix the meeting time on the home page
5b2a9f3 Add basic styling for the home page
a3f9c21 Add the club home page

Short hash, first line of the message, nothing else. Three commits that read as three sentences — and this view is precisely why Chapter 2 cared so much about that first line, since nothing else is shown here.

Add -5 to see only the last five entries, which is usually what you want on a real project:

git log --oneline -5

One file's history

On a project with any history at all, the useful question is usually narrower than "everything". Two dashes and a filename limit the log to commits that touched that file:

git log --oneline -- index.html

That answers "when did this page last change" in about two seconds. Git can also search history by message text and by author, and those are worth knowing about later; this book stops here because these three forms cover the first six months.

What the log does not show

git log shows the history and only the history. Your uncommitted work is not in it, because it has not been recorded — that is what git status and git diff are for.

If something you wrote is not in the log, the question is not "where did Git put it" but "did I commit it". Almost always, the answer is no.