If you want to view the history of all the changes you've made to a specific file in Git you can use the log command in Git. This will show you all the commits that touched that file, and the associated commit message.

git log README.md

If you want to see a diff/patch for each commit you can run:

git log --follow --patch README

This can be very useful to track down when a specific piece of code went into (or was taken out of) a file. Be careful as this command only shows you the diff/patch for the file you request. If the commit contains changes to other files you will not see those unless you view the full commit.

I found a bug on a particular line, and need to track down the history for that line. This is easy enough with git blame, but in this case I'm getting false positives. There was a previous check-in that changed whitespace on that line. Obviously that was not the commit that introduced the bug.

Using git log with the -L flag you can specify a file and and range of lines to search through.

git log -L 57,57:index.php

This will show all the commits in index.php where there was a change on line #57.

See also: Finding commits that match a search term

If you need to find the branch that a commit was checked in to use the following command:

git branch --contains 26495cfd4ab17d4d685d0d352ed333f73d6d1b96

This should show a list of branches, with the respective branched highlighted and preceed with an asterisk.

If you need to show all the commits that modify a specific line you can use git log and the -G flag like this:

git log -G "version" docs/release_history.txt

This will show every commit that contains "version" in one of the modified lines anywhere the file /docs/release_history.txt

I found two cool Git aliases that will show you all the commits that have been made today or yesterday. It's a simple way to figure out what you accomplished.

Define the aliases:

git config --global alias.today "log --since=midnight --oneline --graph --decorate"
git config --global alias.yesterday "log --after=yesterday.midnight --before 0am --oneline --graph --decorate"

Then run it with:

git today
git yesterday

I borrowed the idea from Coderwall.

If you want to create a new branch in Git, and set it up so it's tracked upstream also do this:

git checkout -b branch_name
git push -u origin branch_name

git push -u handles setting the upstream, as well as setting the local branch to track the remote branch.