Re: Usage of git whatchanged

On Sun, Sep 14, 2025, at 21:34, Bjoern Bastian wrote:

Hi Kristoffer,

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You can also make a Git alias.

    git config set --global alias.wh 'log --raw --no-merges'

neat, thank you, I never noticed the Git aliases.  I'll do that.

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One can live without, but the statement "whatchanged is not even shorter
to type than log --raw." on https://git-scm.com/docs/git-whatchanged is
a weak one

I have a proposal to remove it.

Makes sense to me.

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that misses obvious use cases of `whatchanged`.

The thing with git-whatchanged is that it uses the same underlying
machinery as git-log.  So there’s nothing that git-whatchanged can do
that git-log cannot do.

... and I guess vice versa.  But historically git-log ended up as the
new-and-better replacement (according to the devs) with git-whatchanged
being kept around for people who was used to typing it.

Knowing Git aliases, there is actually no reason to keep `whatchanged`.
Without the idea to enforce `--i-still-use-this` in the transition time,
this would allow users to continue with their habits if they like to.

Sure, you can use something like that `wh` alias.

But note that you cannot make an alias like this named simply
`whatchanged` (the same name as the command):

    git config set --global alias.whatchanged 'log --raw --no-merges'

(in order to continue with the same habits exactly, verbatim)

Because you cannot currently make an alias that has the same name as a
command like this one.  But it looks like that restriction will be
lifted for deprecated commands in a future version.