git diff master
git diff was probably one of the first 10 terminal commands I ever learnt. I use it a lot for quick comparisons of a few lines, but didn’t get a habit of diff-ing more when I need it the most.
Last week I learnt git diff master 🙏 and very quickly experienced how helpful this is when messing around with code changes in multiple commits on several branches over time. Puh.
I know that there will always and forever be concepts and commands to learn that I wish I had learnt before. I try to accept that. But this was downright annoying, because gah… it would have been so useful to grasp some of this somewhat earlier.
What I’ve been confused about
- what is compared when
- the mental model I had of local branches was a bit off
- something about branches and unstaged changes
What I understand better now
- unstaged changes do not live on any branch (only commits do)
- my editor will show me one version of the code at a time — but I can use the terminal more actively in my workflow to compare lots of different code changes
- and this doesn’t require as advanced commands as I previously thought
git diff
- compares unstaged changes with the last commit on the current branch
git diff master
- compares both commits on the current branch and unstaged changes with master
Note to self — Writing is awesome because attempting to write this post gets most of the credit for levelling up and actually understanding this properly. 🏆