browsing commits with vim

just a little vim trick

2025-08-31

So earlier I was actually using fzf as a little ad-hoc git commit browser because fzf is my favorite and I love using it as a simple little UI for stuff like this.

git log --oneline \
  | fzf --tac \
    --preview="git show {1}" \
    --bind "enter:become(git show {1})"

It looks like this:

And the ‘bind’ command means that pressing enter closes fzf and shows the commit as though typing git commit <hash>.

I thought it was pretty neat!

Then I thought about how I recently switched to using vim to browse man pages, and wondered whether there was a way to also use vim to browse git commits.

You can very easily pipe some commit oneliners into vim:

git log --oneline | nvim -

From there, it’s a matter of remembering about K and keywordprg.

Runs the program given by ‘keywordprg’ to lookup the |word| (defined by ‘iskeyword’) under or right of the cursor. Default is “man”.

:help K

If you press K on a git commit hash, you’ll get the error ‘no man page for (hash)’

Until/unless you set the keywordprg:

:set keywordprg=git\ show

Now if you press K on a hash, you’ll get the commit message and diff open up in a tab.

This is awesome!

With a few further tweaks, like setting the filetype with a cli flag and setting the keywordprg in a ftplugin file, you can make a little alias to have the thing ready:

alias glv='git log --oneline | nvim -R -c 'set filetype=git" -"

GIF? GIF!