How to view changes in one file in GitHub?

Question

My last update updated ~ 300 files, and the diff page says Sorry, we could not display the entire diff because it was too big and is so slow that I can hardly scroll through it. How to view changes for one file?

When viewing a specific file, I expected to have a link to compare it with the previous version, but I can not find it. Am I missing something or why isn’t such an important function here?

Answer 1

Use git diff. It can accept changes and file arguments.

 git diff master ./myawesomefile.txt 

will show how the main version of the file differs from your local version

 git diff 878a984e ./myawesomefile.txt 

will show how commit hash 786876 differs from the current local version

 git diff 878a984e 48d74774 ./myawesomefile.txt 

will show how commit hash 878a984e version of myawesomefile.txt differs from 48d74774

Answer 2

I think you are looking for this cheat sheet . You can compare over time, for example, this link with master@%7B2015-02-27%7D...master at the end or through commit for certain files, like this one does with ^ after the base you want to compare.

I try to do it locally using git fetch master && git diff ..master to compare my current branch with the updated wizard, but you can certainly do it with the above.

Answer 3

You can use the GitHub File Diff extension, available for Chrome and Firefox .

Disclaimer: I made this extension.

Answer 4

You can view the history of file changes by clicking the history button or by adding commits to the file URL. Here's what it looks like for a file in the homebrew repo on github.

eg.

 https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/commits/master/SUPPORTERS.md 

---

Or you can try:

There are essentially two different ways in GitHub to see repository commit history:

 By navigating directly to the commits page of a repository. By clicking on a file, then selecting History, to get to the commit history for a specific file. 

For more information on how Git views commit history, see the “Simplifying History” section of the [git log] help article [2].