Re: [RFC PATCH] Make :/ accept a regex rather than a fixed pattern

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:20:20 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Make :/ accept a regex rather than a fixed pattern

This also makes it trigger anywhere in the commit message, rather than
just at the beginning. Which tends to be a lot more useful.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
---

I'm re-sending, because after having this in my tree for several weeks 
now, I actually end up still using it. 

I agree that it's still not a wonderful thing, and it's entirely possible 
that we should strive to use just HEAD in :/ commit finding rather than 
all refs we can find, but for at least the kernel, I don't care (since my 
tree tends to have just one main branch anyway, apart from some random 
testing stuff I keep around).

But even if we want to limit it to HEAD, that would be a separate patch.

I've personally used it for things like

	git show :/mqueue	# did I apply that 'mqueue' patch?
	git show :/akpm		# what was the last patch I got from Andrew?

and while in all cases I could admittedly have done exactly the same thing 
with something like "git log -p -1 --grep=mqueue" instead, I've used it as 
a nice shortcut.

I already took this but I actually started hating it.  As I have
merge.summary on,

    git show ':/diff: add configuration option'

almost never hits the commit I am looking for---instead it ends up finding
a merge that merges it.

I however suspect that I would hate it much less after retraining my
fingers to anchor the pattern at the beginning of the line.  But not
yet...