When orphaning a commit on a detached HEAD, the warning currently looks like: Warning: you are leaving 3 commits behind, not connected to any of your branches: - commit subject 1 - commit subject 2 - commit subject 3 If you want to keep them by creating a new branch, this may be a good time to do so with: git branch new_branch_name 933a615ab0bc566dcfd8c01ec8af159f770d3fe5 Instead of using the "-" list, let's provide a more traditional oneline format, with the abbreviated sha1 before each subject. Users are accustomed to seeing commits in this format, and having the sha1 of each commit can be useful if you want to cherry-pick instead of creating a new branch. The new format looks like: Warning: you are leaving 3 commits behind, not connected to any of your branches: 933a615 commit subject 1 824fcde commit subject 2 fa49b1a commit subject 3 Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> --- Other thoughts I had but didn't do were: - abbreviate the sha1 in the example "git branch" command; it looks very long to me. - colorize the oneline list in the usual way. This helps makes the subjects stand out, but it's a little weird since the rest of the warning is not colorized at all. - an advice.detachedOrphan option. I'm not sure what it should look like exactly (just shorten the message, remove the orphan check entirely, etc) so I figured we'd wait until somebody actually is annoyed by the verbosity of the message and see what we would want then. - when we don't detect an orphan commit, we still print the old "Previous HEAD was..." message. The point of that was to mention the tip in case it was important. Where I think important could be one of: 1. you are orphaning some commits 2. you might want to remember how to get back to some interesting spot in history We've already checked that (1) is not the case. There is perhaps still some value to (2), but I don't know that I've ever used it. And you can always pull the answer from the HEAD reflog (technically you can do that for (1), too, of course, but I think the warning is more appropriate in that instance). So we could perhaps get rid of that message entirely, and print nothing when leaving a detached HEAD that is not being orphaned. builtin/checkout.c | 5 ++++- 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) diff --git a/builtin/checkout.c b/builtin/checkout.c index f88d2c8..686d0ff 100644 --- a/builtin/checkout.c +++ b/builtin/checkout.c @@ -619,7 +619,10 @@ static void describe_one_orphan(struct strbuf *sb, struct commit *commit) struct pretty_print_context ctx = { 0 }; parse_commit(commit); - strbuf_addstr(sb, " - "); + strbuf_addstr(sb, " "); + strbuf_addstr(sb, + find_unique_abbrev(commit->object.sha1, DEFAULT_ABBREV)); + strbuf_addch(sb, ' '); pretty_print_commit(CMIT_FMT_ONELINE, commit, sb, &ctx); strbuf_addch(sb, '\n'); } -- 1.7.2.5.10.g62fe7 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html