title: Show history of a file?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/278192/view-the-change-history-of-a-file-using-git-versioning">View the change history of a file using Git versioning</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>Sometimes I want to step through the history of a particular file. In the past I used P4V and this was very quick and intuitive. </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Right click on a file and select history.</li>
  <li>Scrolling through the dates and see a nice diff of exactly what changed in <strong>that</strong> file on <strong>that</strong> date. Simple.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Switching to git this is now a grueling task. </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>"git log filename"</li>
  <li>Look at history and pick a date, copy hash</li>
  <li>"git diff hash"</li>
  <li>Scroll through diff for the stuff that changed in the file I am interested in.</li>
  <li>Nope, that's not it, lets try a different date - back to step 2, rinse and repeat.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I've searched SO, and I've tried a few of the commonly suggested guis: github, gitk, gitg, git-gui.</p>
  
  <p>These all remove the need to manually run commands, but the workflow is the same for this. View history of file; view commit; search through diff of lots of irrelevant files. It's slow and repetitive.</p>
  
  <p>All the data is in the repo so I see no reason this simple common use case could not be more streamlined.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone recommend a tool that does this - or a more efficient way to utilize the command line to do what I want?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any suggestions.</p>