[git] Display last git commit comment

Often during a commit ($ git -commit -m ""), I wish to read my last comment to remember what progress I have made. Is there an easy way to directly access the last commit message through command-line? (I'm using Windows.)

Generally:

git log -n

will show you the last n commit messages

More elegantly - if you want a quick overview of your commits

git log --oneline -n

This will Show just the first line of the last n commit messages.

You can save this as a git alias or a shell alias with a shorter command. I've got it in my shell as glog, for example, and I can see my last 10 commit messages with glog -10.

You can use

git show -s --format=%s

Here --format enables various printing options, see documentation here. Specifically, %smeans 'subject'. In addition, -s stands for --no-patch, which suppresses the diff content.

I often use

git show -s --format='%h %s'

where %h denotes a short hash of the commit

Another way is

git show-branch --no-name HEAD

It seems to run faster than the other way.

I actually wrote a small tool to see the status of all my repos. You can find it on github.

git log -1 will display the latest commit message or git log -1 --oneline if you only want the sha1 and associated commit message to be displayed.

git log -1 branch_name will show you the last message from the specified branch (i.e. not necessarily the branch you're currently on).

For something a little more readable, run this command once:

git config --global alias.lg "log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative"

so that when you then run:

git lg

you get a nice readout. To show only the last line:

git lg -1

Solution found here

To start with git log -1 --pretty='%s'

But the below one covers all the cases,

git log --pretty='format:%Creset%s' --no-merges -1

• No unwanted white spaces
• Discards merge commits
• No commit id, date, Displays only the messages.

Paste & see for yourself

I did this

git reflog -1 | sed 's/^.*: //'

If you want to see just the subject (first line) of the commit message:

git log -1 --format=%s

This was not previously documented in any answer. Alternatively, the approach by nos also shows it.

Reference:

• git log - emsem

This command will get you the last commit message:

git log -1 --oneline --format=%s | sed 's/^.*: //'

outputs something similar to:

Create FUNDING.yml

You can change the -1 to any negative number to increase the range of commit messages retrieved

I just found out a workaround with shell by retrieving the previous command.

Press Ctrl-R to bring up reverse search command:

reverse-i-search

Then start typing git commit -m, this will add this as search command, and this brings the previous git commit with its message:

reverse-i-search`git commit -m`: git commit -m "message"

Enter. That's it!

(tested in Ubuntu shell)