Open lazygit with commit-hash as input

[nobbmaestro]

Hi,

I'm looking for a way of invoking lazygit with a commit-hash as parameter (as git show <hash>). The idea is to inject latest commit of highlighted line via NeoVim, and launch lazygit log at the commit.

To my knowledge, there is no for doing this, lazygit log --filter takes only path from CLI. Is there an intuitive way of accomplishing this? My initial idea is to create a custom command where the hash is obtain from e.g. the clipboard.

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work! Truly amazing utility you guys have created!

[stefanhaller]

There's no way to do this with lazygit currently. I guess the closest you can get right now is to start lazygit, press 4 / to jump to the commits view and start searching, and then paste the hash to search for it. Maybe you can find ways to automate this by sending keystrokes to lazygit's terminal window.

I have the same need, and I have been thinking about how to improve the history browsing experience in lazygit, but currently lazygit just isn't a very suitable tool for this. I'm using gitk for this myself, it serves my needs much better.

A few reasons:

• lazygit initially only loads the first 300 commits, for efficiency reasons. This would have to change, but we have problems with memory consumption in larger repositories when loading more.
• Ideally you not only want to show the target commit, but also highlight the line you were looking at in your editor. This is an essential time saver for larger commits. But it's pretty much impossible to do when a custom pager is used. (Besides, we can't even highlight lines at all in the main view right now). Improve clicking in diff view to enter staging/patch building #3986 could be a way to make some progress towards both of this, but currently it doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
• There needs to be a way to jump further back into history if the commit that was initially shown isn't the right one. In my experience this is the case in the vast majority of cases. Very often, when you blame a line of code and open its commit, you find a commit where a variable or function was renamed, or some other refactoring which is uninteresting; you'll then have to jump to the previous commit that changed the code to find the change you are interested in. Very often I need some five hops back in this way to find what I'm looking for. Again, if we had Improve clicking in diff view to enter staging/patch building #3986 this could be added relatively easily, but without it I don't see how we can add this functionality. In gitk it is very easy.
• Something similar to the back button in an Internet browser is essential when working this way. Sometimes when you jump back into history as described above, you will make a hop that was the wrong one, and in that case you want to "undo" the jump and go back to the previous commit you looked at. Again, gitk makes this easy, but lazygit doesn't have this, and doesn't really need it outside of this specific workflow.

Let me know if you want to know more about my gitk workflow.

[nobbmaestro]

Thank you for the elaborated response.

As a matter of fact, I managed to resolve this by extending my existing script for integrating nvim and lazygit via tmux. From NeoVim, I'm able to call the script via user command with the commit hash as parameter. The script in turn will launch Lazygit in new window and send the necessary keys for locating the commit and step into it.

I was not aware that Lazygit only loads first 300 commits, for now, the script is launching the Lazygit in filter mode. I'm rarely working in code bases where a single file may have more 300 commits for a single file. Therefore, this should not be a limitation based on my current needs.

Perhaps not the prettiest solution but it seems to do the trick for now.

Thank you for response and guidance. Keep up the good work!