Here is my personal wishlist after a short test-drive.

- Blame-based stats. While it is nice to see an overview of the historical contributions of Bob and Alice, this is not something that I would use on a daily basis. What would be more useful, is to present the same tables based on the blame lines of a tree-ish. This would show the de-facto "owner(s)" of modules/files, something which comes handy when asking for help with something or even assigning reviews. One could also run this iteratively over the history and get some nice timeline graph.

- Support for pattern-based inclusions/exclusions. E.g. I am not interested to see stats on the json files used by tests. Or any kind of auto-generated files (e.g. django migrations).

- Support for a configuration file, to store your preferred settings in your git repo. Something TOML-based perhaps.

- Better packaging (nit). E.g. the linux tarball for v0.6 contains some apple-related "junk" and gnu tar complains about archive format incompatibilities.

Not sure what's happening with the tarball. Will take a look at that.

If a patch or pull request is sent but an internal contributor (the only internal contributor in Vim's case for a long time) reformatted it before merging then the same work is double-counted (if full history is kept) or only attributed to the reformatter (if history is squashed during/before merge).

This doesn't make the result wrong, of course, the tool is doing exactly what it says on the tin. But it does mean that, without reviewing the contribution process (current and past), you might need to be less definite¹, when stating a meaning derived from the result, because how the result is interpreted might not be quite right given the input data available.

----

[0] https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2025/03/who-will-maintain-vi... in case you skipped by the link when looking at git-who's readme.

[1] perhaps just by giving caveats to make sure that the reader has sufficient context regarding the limit of the process

'git blame' is named after the subversion and CVS blame features that do the same thing. Subversion docs are clear that it's a snarky name and that 'svn praise' and 'svn annotate' are neutral synonyms.

Perhaps someone familiar with CVS can comment on its history there since it seems to be the first source control to add it.

EDIT: and one of the main reasons it's a useful feature is it tells you who to talk to to understand a piece of code, or to coordinate a roll back, or to do any other sort of communication. It probably matters more in a big company where code is changing frequently and you're unlikely to know everyone and what they're working on.

A few years ago, some Atlassian developer changed "Blame" in the BitBucket UI to "Annotate". I remember a lot of people being frustrated because they couldn't find "blame" anywhere and the change was never officially announced. It just happened one day

Someone opened a ticket with BitBucket about it which ended up drawing a lot of attention from frustrated users who couldn't find "blame", and their searches for it on Google led people to the ticket. Atlassian eventually responded saying that they made the change because "blame" sounds bad and can hurt people's feelings somehow (with no examples given of course, though ironically the dev who made the change certainly had hurt feelings after the upset masses had some choice words for the short-sighted decision. Though Atlassian doubled down and I believe closed the ticket without reverting the change, so the confusion remains, as far as I know)

I don't think that they ever mentioned the Subversion/CVS parallel that was drawn to choose that name, so it was really confusing why that was selected. But this comment shed some light on that ancient incident

Nomenclature matters. Do not reinvent terms just for fun.

Dev probably became the public face for a decision made by someone else (eg. Product owner, TL, whatever the business structure is in Atlassian)

The feelings hurt thing is real, unfortunately for myself I am that person that gets butthurt but it's a phrasing thing, "why did you do this?" vs. something more neutral sounding like "hey this has this side effect are you aware".

Anyway unfortunately in my case too we're not allowed to write tests so it really is an exercise in omniscience.

You should also write tests. They ensure that your code works as intended. Some teammates might not understand that untested code can cause more development time since broken features will have to be fixed in production, so highlighting bugs that have to be fixed as well as writing tests thst cover as many cases as possible should shine some light for those still not understanding their value

Sometimes it's easier to adopt better practices when moving to another team or project altogether

It's actually a pretty awful feature because it misses so much context. I've been blamed before for changes which were technically my fault, but while my code was to spec, some unrelated part of the code I was interacting with was not (iirc it was some multi-threaded nonsense like a race condition or something).

It was a super-stressful week of constantly having to defend my design decisions and white-boarding my thought process (think of the "am I taking crazy pills?!?" scene in Zoolander) as my senior coworker tried to gaslight and throw me under the bus.

Maybe I've had a uniquely bad experience with it, but I've vowed to never use it (as a way to attribute `blame`). Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move, resolve issues without drama, and make sure your whole team is on the same page: this is a cohesive team, not an adversarial dick-measuring contest.

For instance, I may want to change some basic behavior. Easy enough, spend some time implementing and testing, and then run into a downstream consequence of that change while implementing. Now I need to make a decision. Reviewing the history of the relevant sections of code, using git blame, can help me uncover the context and ways in which the code I'm puzzling about changing has changed previously. This can be incredibly valuable and speed up or even obviate an amount of discussion around the potential change.

Aviation is the shining example of this, combining high traceability (you should be able to track each part back to the factory and to all the technicians who have worked on it) with accident inquiries that are focused around finding cause and avoiding future risks rather than assigning blame.

> Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move

That's true when we design something. Once the design is done, and is broken, we have to tear it back apart to understand WHAT is broken. That's when blame is useful.

I love using git blame. I love it even more when it comes back with something I made, because then I get to learn. When something I thought was safe turned out to break something, that's an invaluable chance to understand the system better.

That being said, I've totally used the blame output to end a series of excuses from a junior about how "his code was definitely right, but everything else was garbage" because I really do not care. If it worked before, but doesn't work now, that's a problem. Part of the modern process of "fail fast" is also to build up taste about which parts of a working system are spooky.

I find that some people take the "blameless" culture too far, and use it as an excuse not to reflect on outcomes. They just ruffle the code whenever there's a big, and don't think critically about why that bug appeared. What that tells us about the system we're making.

Ofc as my org has gotten bigger, we've lost a lot of the discipline around writing good commit messages so now it's just a mess of large code-changes with 1-line "bugfix" explainations :(

I have a battle at the moment to try and get the team I am in (5 devs) to take their git commit messages and history seriously, but the "TL" has said that he "doesn't care that much about commits/history/etc"

That bit us right on the ass when debugging someone elses branch recently, because the state needed to fix was across three seemingly unconnected commits, so a checkout of one commit + fix then needed to be tested across two other commits.

Obligatory T-Shirt link

https://www.amazon.com/Blame-Ruining-Friendships-Since-T-Shi...

And the committer and author don’t even need to be the same!

But the point, as I read it, is: what matters is the context, i.e. if a line is faulty, how did things look like when it wasn’t faulty? The commit’s content is more often more important than the committer, although the committer is useful because you can ask them if they’re still around.

Linking a line of code back to the commit is useful even if you can't ask the author about it. It tells you what other lines of code are involved and what the overall purpose is. It's significantly more useful if you can link it into documentation outside the code: ticketing systems, requirements docs, etc.

The main limit to svn blame in that situation was that quite often it would hit commit 1, when the codebase had been imported from Visual SourceSafe.

I really want to find or build a tool that can automatically traverse history this way, like git-evolve-log.

(Work hardening is a metalworking term where metal bent back and forth (or hammered) too much becomes brittle; an analogous effect shows up in code, where a piece of code that has been bugfixed a couple of times will probably be need more fixes; there was a published result a decade or so back about using this to focus QA efforts...)

Example output based on Linux kernel @ "Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://cregit.linuxsources.org/

I learned of Cregit recently--just submitted it to HN after seeing multiple recent HN comments discussing issues related to line-based "blame" annotation granularity:

"Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43451654

git blame is about which author most recently touched each line (in what commit); i.e. is to "blame" for that line having its current content.

You're right in that git blame is most useful for finding which commit touched a line. What was done in the commit is more important than who did it.

git blame is very useful even in a solo project where you already know that you wrote every commit.

There is such a concept as a brand new project not requiring version control until it hits a certain stage: you know it when you get there.

Edit: A large part of the reason now that I think about it is that I don't work off real tickets but just bugs I notice or things that get mentioned on the current solo work project. In a team I can just dissect the ticket and am forced to do only that ticket on the branch whereas solo I'm just jumping all over the place. Sometimes I'll do thing X partway, start considering options and in the meantime do thing Y so it's a mess but the tasks get done so.. For context the project is 1 year old developed from 0 by me. Essentially an internal log parsing and analysis tool for a couple formats. Nothing particularly complex.

The manpage explains what the command does. How and why it's used is up to the user.

"git blame" and similar tools often always show my name, even though I didn't write the code.

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame#Documentation/git-blame.t...

Example output based on Linux kernel @ "Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://cregit.linuxsources.org/

I learned of Cregit recently--just submitted it to HN after seeing multiple recent HN comments discussing issues related to line-based "blame" annotation granularity:

"Cregit-Linux: how code gets into the kernel": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43451654

Of course, in your situation I guess such a tool would only help if other people use it. :D

Particularly so if I can see that someone wrote bad code, so I can review the rest of their code.

Git log gives the author (et al) given a commit.

Git blame gives the commit given the line and file.

Worth noting that annotate and praise were added to address the semantics, regardless of whether they were the original intent or not

e.g., you realize that something broke A/B test logic on Friday. Sure, there are Jira tickets, but that's slow and annoying to dig through. There are commit messages, but things get squashed, etc. Plus, if you work in a monorepo with about 60 PRs a day, it's hard to know if it was your code or an associated library someone touched.

That's exactly when git bisect helps. It quickly narrows down which commit introduced the bug when you don't know where to start looking. Once bisect identifies the problematic commit, you can then use git blame (if needed) to see who made those specific changes.

Edit: Cleaned up what I was saying to hopefully avoid confusion.

If you want to know which commit actually caused a problem you would use bisect. That may be what you're saying, but it sounded a bit like you are saying blame is better for tracking the culprit commit.

This works even without the alias, by the way: by default `git whatever` will search your path for `git-whatever` and execute it.

FWIW, both brew and kubectl also have adopted this behavior (of $(basename)-plugin style verb extensions) so I find it unlikely they'd all do it if it was a straight-up facepalm

My "blame script" has been slowing down as the repo size increases. I was just about to add caching, like you have.

Have you thought about adding the ability to limit the stats based on a set of file patterns? Perhaps like this, where the file follows gitignore conventions?

  git-who table -include-file <fname>
  git-who table -ignore-file <fname>

If you have a shell that supports extended globbing, you could do something like:

  $ git who table */**/*.go

  $ git log */**/*.go

Details here:

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/blob/main/scripts/blame.py

Again, nice work on your tool. I’ll spend some more time trying to harness it for my need.

I might have my globbing syntax wrong, but I think that `*/**/*.go` is the same as `**/*.go` unless you have `*.go` files in the working directory.

Or maybe someone has wrote a bot/Git hook for that?

    (crontab -l 2>/dev/null; echo '15 22 \* \* \* /usr/bin/git blame --line-porcelain abc123.. -- /path/to/file.txt | awk "/^author-mail/ {print \$2}" | sort -u | /usr/bin/mail -s "Authors" user@example.com') | crontab -

  - who deleted this line (which one?)
  - who is owner of this method (some guy refactored it or reformatted, but who is the REAL owner, or what was the history of this method)

It doesn't work perfectly, but with magit you can jump to the revision before the refactor/reformat, then do another blame from there. I chased a line of code through several layers of refactors that way before and while the original author was long gone it did help explain why things were initially done that way.

I heavily depend on git-blame to understand code. It's one reason why I generally dislike "cleanup" changes that just change formatting/naming for the sake of it.

That is what I use git for each and every day.

  git help mailmap

Amazing work and excited to dig into this more thoroughly

For a rails codebase that is ~18 years old, has 1695 committers and more than 220,000 commits:

  time git who
  ...
  real    0m2.885s
  user    0m2.711s
  sys     0m0.767s

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_97#_git-blame-infor...

Like the sibling comment, I didn't want to run all of GitLens just for it, but now that it's a built-in I've also been finding it quite useful.

I uninstalled it, I seem to recall it impacting the speed of VS Code a good bit.

this is a great tool!

I made a similar powershell script recently but reverse search from filename to find the authors by commits.

I've been using a git alias for quite some time

`lead = shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges`

Run on log from GNU Bison. We anonymize names so that search engines don't index this comment to those names:

  $ ./gwho git-log-stat.txt
  NAME                     LAST-SEEN                      FILES    LINES+   LINES- COMMITS
  A___ D_______            Tue Sep 20 08:19:02 2022 +0200 17083    356066   255931    4440
  P___ E_____              Mon Mar 17 17:46:43 2025 -0700  4496     61898    71486    1123
  J___ E_ D____            Sun Aug 21 17:35:26 2011 -0400  3922     75517    50121     612
  R_____ A_____            Thu May 2 16:43:00 2002 +0000    101      7631     4522      23
  J____ T____              Sun Jan 21 16:43:58 2001 +0000   200      8308     3205      60
  P___ H________           Tue Feb 26 16:28:36 2013 -0800   122      5057     2864      26
  A___ R_______            Wed Jan 5 15:47:25 2011 +0200    124      5297     2101      30
  T________ R______        Tue Nov 13 10:38:49 2012 +0000   229      3841     2744      94
  V_______ T_____          Wed Nov 11 18:55:15 2020 +0100    67      4739     1128      17
  J__ M_______             Sat Jan 18 20:52:21 2020 -0800   337      1569     3894      45
  J___ M_____ G_______     Mon May 12 00:58:38 2008 +0000    91      2570     2060      49
  R______ M_ S_______      Mon Jan 5 00:25:39 1998 +0000    134      2978     1155      64
  P____ B______            Tue Nov 11 13:37:36 2008 +0100    90      2991      786      17
  A____ V___               Mon Sep 19 19:09:20 2022 +0200   130      2335      943      46
  M___ A_____              Sun Jan 20 15:59:34 2002 +0000   201      1797     1291      76
  D____ J__                Sun Dec 7 21:54:45 2008 -0800     57      2142      816      15
  P_____ B___              Fri Oct 19 11:03:50 2001 +0000    67      1771     1182      19
  E___ B____               Thu Aug 27 10:56:53 2009 -0600    61      2172      590      22
  V_____ S_____            Fri Jun 29 16:23:42 2012 +0200    64       865      918       9
  D____ M________          Thu Nov 10 22:34:22 1994 +0000    26      1526       84      18
  D_____ H_________        Thu Jun 13 10:08:19 2013 +0200     6      1142       54       1
  V______ I______          Sat Jan 23 13:25:18 2021 -0500    47       824      360      16
  A_____ V___________      Thu Feb 27 09:52:03 2020 +0100    25       524      189      13
  V_____ M______ C______   Fri Feb 14 18:41:55 2020 +0100    16       284      364       1
  J_____ W___              Tue Feb 16 08:00:28 2021 -0600    18       306       33       3
  W_______ P____           Thu Feb 21 17:08:18 2008 +0000    13       195       76       9
  J___ S____               Wed Jul 26 00:30:05 2017 -0400    67        88       88      63
  E___ S_ R______          Wed Feb 13 10:39:54 2019 -0500     2       133       33       1
  Y_______ K_____          Mon Nov 11 08:57:15 2019 +0900     5       125       13       2
  K______ K_______         Sun Jan 27 06:58:17 2019 +0100     3        85       24       1
  H_ S_ T___               Fri Mar 1 06:16:54 2019 +0100      1        45       51       1
  T__ L__________          Tue Mar 27 19:28:02 2012 +0000     9        81        9       5
  T__ V__ H_____           Fri Jan 11 15:32:06 2002 +0000     7        55       34       3
  A________ D_________     Wed May 14 18:41:48 2003 +0000     3        66       16       1
  L_____ V_____            Fri Aug 9 14:24:14 2019 +0200      8        71        2       2
  M______ D_ B_________    Thu Jul 30 20:53:35 2020 +0200    10        30       29       3
  J______                  Tue Nov 20 22:02:20 2018 +0100     3        30       28       3
  J_______ N_____          Tue Dec 15 22:03:18 2009 -0600    10        42       13       3
  N___ F_______            Mon Sep 6 19:51:09 1993 +0000      7        36       18       7
  K__ K______              Tue Oct 13 15:39:41 2020 -0700     5        26       28       2
  E_____ S________         Mon Dec 10 15:18:37 2018 +0200    10        25       25       1
  M_____ R____             Wed Nov 18 09:10:01 2020 +0100    10        26       13       2
  J___ B_____              Mon Oct 2 20:04:58 2000 +0000      3        26        8       1
  T_____ P________         Tue May 19 22:05:22 2020 +0200     4        29        2       1
  A_____ B_______          Sun Mar 6 22:19:18 2011 -0500      6        24        2       2
  N___ G_____              Tue Oct 27 06:12:27 2020 +0000     4        14       11       3
  B____ K_____             Sat Feb 19 19:24:07 2011 -0500     6        22        2       2
  A___ S______             Wed Oct 31 14:01:31 2018 +0000     1        12        9       1
  S_____ T______           Mon Nov 24 15:27:49 2008 +0100     1        11        6       1
  F______ K____            Tue May 14 00:25:23 2002 +0000     3        11        6       2
  A______ H______          Fri Apr 29 04:08:35 2022 -0400     2         8        6       1
  B____ H_____             Sat Dec 18 18:45:46 2021 +0100     4         3        9       2
  T___ C_ M_____           Tue Nov 10 07:36:11 2020 +0100     2         8        3       1
  E______ S_________       Fri Nov 4 11:50:32 2022 -0700      3         5        5       1
  k_____ y                 Mon Nov 11 23:27:37 2019 +0900     3         3        3       3
  S______ L________        Sat Jul 21 17:24:23 2012 +0200     3         3        3       2
  A____ D_______           Sat Feb 15 10:49:14 2020 +0100     2         2        2       2
  J_____ L_                Fri Aug 24 17:35:32 2018 +0000     1         1        1       1
  D_____ H______           Wed Nov 29 01:26:22 1995 +0000     1         1        1       1
  A______ S_____           Sat Sep 28 00:00:34 2013 +0200     1         1        1       1
  A_____ R___              Mon Jun 14 21:54:40 2021 +0000     1         1        1       1

  #!/usr/bin/env txr
  @(do
     (defstruct author ()
       name
       e-mail
       last-seen
       (files 0)
       (lines+ 0)
       (lines- 0)
       (commits 0))

     (defvarl ah (hash)))
  @(repeat)
  Author: @name <@addr>
  Date: @date
  @(skip)
   @files file@nil changed, @ins insertion@nil, @del deletion@nil
  @  (set name @(flow name ;; anonymize name
                  (spl " ")
                  (map (op map (do if (plusp @2) #\_ @1) @1 0))
                  (join-with " ")))
  @  (do (let ((a (or [ah name]
                      (new author
                           name name
                           e-mail addr
                           last-seen date))))
           (inc a.commits)
           (inc a.files (tointz files))
           (inc a.lines+ (tointz ins))
           (inc a.lines- (tointz del))
           (set [ah name] a)))
  @(end)
  @(do
     (flow (hash-values ah)
       (csort @1 > [callf + .lines+ .lines-])
       (cons (new author
                  name "NAME" last-seen "LAST-SEEN" files "FILES"
                  lines+ "LINES+" lines- "LINES-" commits "COMMITS"))
       (each ((a @1))
         (put-line `@{a.name 24} @{a.last-seen 30} @{a.files -5} \ \
                    @{a.lines+ -8} @{a.lines- -8} @{a.commits -7}`))))