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Highlighting lines in git blame output based on dates

on Unix , Git
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I tracked a bug today using git blame and had a vague idea when the bug appeared, so I was mostly interested by changes introduced during the last 30 days.
Perusing git blame output to filter out too old lines was tedious, and so tonight I searched for a way to improve the output by highlighting lines in the desired period of time.
Here is an example, highlighting changes that happened from 2017 onward :

The command is thus of the form :

git blame FILE | ack --nogroup --passthru '.*(?:DATE_1|...|DATE_N).*?\)'

Few explanations :

  • passthru option prints all lines, whether or not they match the expression
  • a non capturing group is used (?:...) so that the highlight selection matches the whole regex, not just the date group
  • we use a lazy quantifier .*? to stop the highlighting at the first ) delimiter, in case the line of code contains some others

As usual, I don’t need to remember the exact command, as I rely on my zsh history to autocomplete my typing, or my git cheatsheet when the history fails me.