Recently, the open-source Git project released its latest version 2.40, bringing some new features and bug fixes. Highlights of this release include updates to the git jump tool, enhancements to cat-file tool, and faster response on Windows.
Taylor Blau, staff software engineer at GitHub provided a detailed walkthrough of the updates in Git 2.40. git jump, an optional tool in Git's contrib directory, now supports Emacs and Vim. The git jump tool works by wrapping Git commands, such as git grep, and feeding their results into Vim's quickfix list.
If you are using Emacs, git jump can be used to generate a list of locations using the command M-x grepgit jump --stdout grep foo. The command will then show all matches of "foo" in your project, enabling easy navigation. Git jump also works with diff and merge.
Git's cat-file tool is commonly used to print out the contents of arbitrary objects in Git repositories. With Git version 2.38.0, cat-file tool got support to apply Git's mailmap rules when printing out the contents of a commit. To understand the size of a particular object, --batch-check and -s options were used with cat-file tool. However, the previous versions of Git had an issue causing incorrect results when using the --use-mailmap option with the cat-file tool in combination with the --batch-check and -s options. With Git 2.40, this has been corrected, and the --batch-check and -s options will now report the object size correctly.
The git check-attr command is used to determine which gitattributes are set for a given path. These attributes are defined and set by one or more .gitattributes files in a repository. For complex rules or multiple .gitattributes files, check-attr git command was used:
$ git check-attr -a git.c
git.c: diff: cpp
git.c: whitespace: indent,trail,space
Previously, check-attr required an index to be present, making it challenging to use in bare repositories. A bare repository is a directory with a .git suffix without a locally checked-out copy of any of the files under revision control. Now in Git 2.40 and newer versions, there is a support for --source= option to scan for .gitattributes in, making it easier to use in bare repositories.
GitHub's Twitter handle posted the highlights, which caught the attention of the tech community on Twitter. One of the Twitter users Andrew retweeted the announcement with a quote, "git jump seems pretty useful! https://github.com/git/git/tree/v2.19.0/contrib/git-jump"
Git 2.40 also includes improvements to rewrite old parts of Git from Perl or Shell to modern C equivalents. This allows Git commands to run faster on platforms like Windows. Now, git bisect is now implemented in C as a native builtin and the legacy implementation git add --interactive has been retired.
There are some improvements to Git’s CI infrastructure in version 2.40. Some long-running Windows-specific CI builds have been disabled, resulting in faster and more resource-efficient CI runs for Git developers.