History & recovery tools

The read-only tools for finding things in your history, and the recovery tools for getting things back. Most live under the Tools menu and ⌘K.

This page is being expanded

The full walkthrough is on its way. Here's the outline of what it covers; the Features list has the short version in the meantime.

What this page will cover

Bisect — mark commits good/bad/skip and watch the candidate range narrow live on the canvas until the first bad commit is found.
Blame — line-by-line attribution with an ignore-whitespace toggle, rename-following.
Per-file history — one file's commits with rename-following (git log --follow).
Search by author (git log --author) across all history.
Pickaxe / diff-content search (git log -S/-G) — every commit whose diff touched a string or pattern. Search Code (⌘F) and Search Commit Content (⌘⇧F).

Reflog rescue — browse every historical HEAD position and restore to any of them.
Rerere — see what git has recorded a conflict resolution for, and toggle rerere.enabled without a terminal.
Dangling-object recovery — git fsck finds a commit nothing points to and recovers it as a new branch.

These pair with the Safety Manager, which snapshots before every mutation.