git-smartlog

A Sapling-style smartlog for plain Git, in a single self-contained zsh script.

It renders the current branch's draft stack — the first-parent chain of your local (unpushed) commits — drawn on top of its nearest public (pushed) base, with relative timestamps, authors, and ref decorations, closely mirroring the output of Sapling's sl.

Example

On a feature branch with a few local commits stacked on origin/master:

$ git smartlog
  @  23de132889  14 minutes ago  junz
  │  Wire backoff into the HTTP client
  │
  o  a8d1958eb9  Today at 10:30  junz
  │  Add exponential backoff with jitter
  │
  o  2d6999d80d  Today at 08:05  junz
╭─╯  Extract retry policy into its own module
│
o  7582005a1c  Yesterday at 16:45  junz  origin/master
│  Bump dependencies
~

@ marks HEAD; the indented o nodes above the bend (╭─╯) are your unpushed draft commits, newest first. Below the bend sits the public base — the nearest pushed commit, here origin/master — and ~ marks the truncated history beyond it.

Widen the public window with -n. Public commits authored by someone else render metadata-only (no author, no subject), exactly as Sapling does — see a7b65c2438 below:

$ git smartlog -n 5
  @  23de132889  14 minutes ago  junz
  │  Wire backoff into the HTTP client
  │
  o  a8d1958eb9  Today at 10:30  junz
  │  Add exponential backoff with jitter
  │
  o  2d6999d80d  Today at 08:05  junz
╭─╯  Extract retry policy into its own module
│
o  7582005a1c  Yesterday at 16:45  junz  origin/master
│  Bump dependencies
│
o  a7b65c2438  Yesterday at 09:30
│
│
o  91eb0d1793  Wednesday at 14:20  junz
│  Add config loader and defaults
~

In a real terminal the output is colorized — draft hashes in bold yellow, HEAD's line in magenta, remote refs in green. ANSI is suppressed when stdout isn't a TTY (as in these captures) or when NO_COLOR is set.

Requirements

• zsh
• git

That's it. The script sources nothing else, so you can drop it anywhere on your PATH and run it.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junzh0u/git-smartlog/master/git-smartlog \
  -o ~/.local/bin/git-smartlog
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/git-smartlog

Because the script is named git-smartlog and lives on your PATH, Git picks it up as a subcommand — run it as git smartlog. A short alias is handy:

git config --global alias.sl smartlog

Usage

usage: git-smartlog [-n N] [--base REV]

  -n, --limit N   public commits to show, including the merge-base (default 1)
      --base REV  override the public base (default: nearest remote trunk, e.g.
                  origin/HEAD, origin/main, origin/master, upstream/main)
  -h, --help      show this help and exit

How it works

• Public base — the nearest public ancestor of HEAD. Candidate trunks are remote-tracking refs only (origin/HEAD, upstream/HEAD, origin/main, origin/master, upstream/main, upstream/master); among those, the one whose merge-base with HEAD is closest to HEAD wins. @{u} and a local main/master are last-resort fallbacks when no remote trunk exists.
• Drafts — first-parent commits in HEAD ^base, newest first.
• Public window — -n commits starting at the base.
• Relative time — mirrors Sapling's smartdate: age() ("N minutes ago") within 90 minutes, calendar-day simpledate() ("Yesterday", "Mon DD", …) beyond it.
• Color — ANSI, automatically suppressed when stdout isn't a TTY or NO_COLOR is set.

Differences from Sapling's sl

• Single stack only. It renders the current HEAD's first-parent draft chain plus its public base. Sapling renders every draft branch as its own stack via a full DAG renderer; this script deliberately does not, so other local branches and draft heads won't appear. Output matches sl exactly when you're working a single branch (the common case).
• Long subjects shown in full. Sapling truncates them to the terminal width with an ellipsis.

License

MIT