I have on occasion also wished to view log messages (especially with
patches) one at a time. And although I agree that a dedicated pager is
overkill, perhaps a small script wouldn't be.
The attached script will eventually run afoul of argument length limits,
but seems to work well otherwise. If you're using less(1), you can step
through the files using :n, :p, and :x.
Cheers,
-- Alex
#!/bin/sh
# Use csplit(1) to split a git log into one commit per file, then run the
# pager on the split files.
. $(git --exec-path)/git-sh-setup
SPLIT_DIR="$GIT_DIR/split-$$"
CSPLIT="csplit -s -k"
if csplit --help 2>/dev/null | sane_grep -- "-z" >/dev/null;
then
CSPLIT="$CSPLIT -z"
fi
_x40='[0-9a-f][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][0-9a-f]'
_x40="$_x40$_x40$_x40$_x40$_x40$_x40$_x40$_x40"
_infty=1000000
mkdir "$SPLIT_DIR" && cd "$SPLIT_DIR" || exit 1
trap 'rm -rf "$SPLIT_DIR"' 0 1 2 3 15
git log "$@" | $CSPLIT - "/^commit $_x40/" "{$_infty}" 2>/dev/null
git_pager "$SPLIT_DIR"/xx*