The team behind Git have released v 2.19 of the beloved open source version control system, promising improved performance, and added features to help you stay on top of your commit history.

One of the tools introduced into the new version is git range-diff – a new implementation of git tbdiff -, which lets users visualise differences between sequences of commits. Those can be useful to get an idea about changes in order, commit message, or actual content when for example git rebase was used to clean up the commits of a patch.

If you’ve ever had trouble finding your hit after a git grep, you might be happy to hear the search function now offers the column number on top of the line information when adding –column to a call. Another addition to grep is the –only-matching (-o) option, which only prints the non-empty and therefore matching parts of a line fitting your search criteria.

Users are now also able to use a branch.sort configuration variable to let the branch command know your prefered way of sorting results – for example alphabetically by name (–sort=refname, the default way) or in order of recent update (–sort=-authordate). Since the -l option – a short-hand for creating a reference log (–create-reflog) – in branch tends to confuse users, the tool now automatically informs them about -l’s purpose, so that they don’t expect things like a list to appear after typing.

Other minor updates include some adjustments to make the version control system run better with newer Apache on Red Hat based distributions, and a –quiet option to make git worktree less verbose. To get better performance out of git, its developers have rewritten  parts of submodule foreach in C, modernised git show-index, and separated the rebase -p codepath from rebase -i to make the latter implementation easier to manage. More details can be found in the official release notes.