Dear Git developers, I'd like to understand what would be required to run `git blame` on individual characters instead of full lines. Could you please point me in the right direction? Someone asked a similar question about "Word-by-word blame/annotate" on StackOverflow a few years ago, and one of the replies said: > Git tracks changes snapshot by snapshot. The line-based format is calculated on-the-fly, and it would also be possible to have a word-based format. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/q/17758008/3461173 This leaves me hopeful that a character-based format can somehow be achieved. Here is a fake example to illustrate what I'm looking for: $ cat myscript.js for (int foo = 0; foo <= 11; foo++) { console.log(foo); } $ git blame --character-based --pseudo-json myscript.js [ { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": "for (int " }, { "commit": "bcd1234a", "summary": "Rename iterator", "characters": "foo" }, { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": " = 0; " }, { "commit": "bcd1234a", "summary": "Rename iterator", "characters": "foo" }, { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": " <= " }, { "commit": "cd1234ab", "summary": "Go up to 11", "characters": "11" }, { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": "; " }, { "commit": "bcd1234a", "summary": "Rename iterator", "characters": "foo" }, { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": "++) { console.log(" }, { "commit": "bcd1234a", "summary": "Rename iterator", "characters": "foo" }, { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": ")" }, { "commit": "d1234abc", "summary": "Add missing semicolon", "characters": ";" }, { "commit": "abcd1234", "summary": "Implement loop", "characters": " }" } ] What would be the most direct way to achieve such a character-based blame/annotate? Should I write some sort of Git extension, or hack into Git's source code? E.g. I looked for an option in `git-blame` or `git-annotate` to change the "next line boundary" from "carret return" (line-based blame) to "any whitespace" (word-based blame) or "character-by-character" (character-based blame), but I didn't find it. Could this be implemented in `blame.c`? If so, which methods would need tweaking? Many thanks! Jan
