View a python function's history over-time with Git & FZF

Posted on 12 Dec, 2021

I am kinda hooked up on modifying my git terminal workflow and integrate FZF wherever I can, this is such an example script to see changes in a python function overtime in your git history. And yes, its interesting (& stupid)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# FZF Wrapper over git to interactively search code changes inside functions

readarray -t choices < <(git ls-files | fzf \
  --prompt="Choose File: " \
  --height 40% --reverse \
)

printf "%s\n" "$(grep -o -P '(?<=def ).*?(?=\()' $choices)" | fzf \
--ansi --preview "echo {} | xargs -I{} git log --color -L :{}:$choices" \
--prompt="Choose function/method: " \
--bind 'j:down,k:up,ctrl-j:preview-down,ctrl-k:preview-up,ctrl-space:toggle-preview' --preview-window right:60% \

The actual trick is finding all python functions and methods names in a given file using grep

$ grep -o -P '(?<=def ).*?(?=\()' rich/columns.py
__init__
add_renderable
__rich_console__
iter_renderables

Next we plug the function name with filename in this git command

git log -L :funciton_name:relative_file_path

Read more about git log searching

Below is a screencast demoing the same for rich package

If you are still interested, here is the script to hack around.

I wish this was scalable to all the programming languages but currently I don't have any clue on how to do this If you want to contribute help me by adding grep patterns to do the same search for you favourite programming language. Thanks