The following are things I found very helpful, which you also may find make your day-to-day usage of Git more enjoyable.

Go HEADless

In many (and perhaps all) cases HEAD is implied when no ref is given, such as the following equivalent statements:

$ git log origin/master..HEAD
$ git log origin/master..

Upstream reference

Before you start referring to the upstream, you’ll want to do a git fetch to update your refs/heads:

$ git fetch

You only need to do this once in a while, or whenever you know the upstream to have changed.

You can refer to the upstream of any branchname or otherwise symbolic-ref by appending @{u} to the ref, such as:

$ git log master@{u}

If you just want the upstream of the current branch, whatever it may be, you can replace master from above with HEAD:

$ git log HEAD@{u}

Upstream difference

Oftentimes I’ll want to see what commits are on upstream that I don’t have. I usually will do this via:

$ git log @{u}..

Which, when on master, is equivalent to:

$ git log origin/master..HEAD

You can see the reverse difference, or the commits are on the remote that you don’t have, by reversing the range:

$ git log ..@{u}

Which, again on master, is equivalent to:

$ git log HEAD..origin/master

To see the full list of formats recognizable, see git revisions --help

If you want to see both of the above at the same time, you can use git log with the –left-right parameter. I’ve also included –format=” and –oneline (which must be passed in that order), which may be optional depending on your format configuration, but for me are not:

$ git log HEAD@{u}...HEAD --left-right --format='' --oneline

Which can be shortened to:

$ git log @{u}... --left-right --format='' --oneline

Note: The above example uses three dots, not two, to show only the commits which are reachable as ancestors of one branch but not the other.

You can replace HEAD in the above with any symbolic-ref or branchname to use as a reference instead. The output (with the format given previously) will look like:

< e86bd83 D
< 6ea2155 C
> eb2de55 B
> 74829bd A

Commits beginning with “<” are only on the left side of the triple-dot (in this case, the upstream), commits beginning with “>” are only on the right side (in this case, the current branch). A..D are the commit messages.

Is it merged?

To find out if a particular branch has been merged into origin/master, you could dig through the log on master and search for it:

$ git log origin/master

Or, if you knew who would have merged it, you could limit the above with that:

$ git log origin/master --author Kris

I wanted a better way, and I found it. I wanted to see if a particular branch had been merged to master without changing branches or having to dig through a log looking for the merge of the branch.

The situation that prompted this was that I had a topic branch, topicB, which depended on another topic branch, topicA. I wanted to see if topicA had been merged into master to find out if I could rebase onto master to get up to date, or if I should continue rebasing on top of the branch.

$ git fetch
$ git branch --contains topicB@{u} -r

This gives you a list of all the remote branches that can reach (as an ancestor) the ref given. origin/master will be right at the top if the branch has been merged into it.

Many thanks to John Wiegley, Scott Chacon and Mark Longair for the sources of the tips.