Expand description
mkit log [<rev>] [<A>..<B> | <A>...<B>] — walk commit history.
With no argument the walk starts at HEAD. A single <rev> starts there
instead; a range A..B shows commits reachable from B but not A
(empty side = HEAD, so A.. is A..HEAD and ..B is HEAD..B).
An A...B symmetric range shows commits reachable from A or B but not
their common ancestors (the merge base). Commits are ordered
reverse-chronologically with a topological tie-break (a parent never
precedes a child) — git’s --date-order. This is identical to git’s
default for linear history and monotonic-timestamp merges; it can differ
only on merge DAGs with non-monotonic (skewed or imported) timestamps.
Output modes:
- default — human-oriented multi-line per commit on stdout. The
full commit message body is printed indented (four spaces) and the
timestamp is rendered as a stable UTC date
(
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS +0000), not the raw integer. --oneline—<abbrev-hex> <title>per commit on stdout. The abbreviation length defaults to 7 (DEFAULT_ABBREV) and is overridable with--abbrev[=N].--format=json— JSONL, one self-contained JSON object per commit. Suitable for piping intojq.
--graph is accepted for git compatibility but is a no-op: it is a
documented v1 non-goal (see docs/CLI.md). Full graph parity is not
achievable given mkit’s content-addressed model; a limited
--oneline --graph renderer remains a possible post-v1 follow-up.
History filters — --author/--grep (substring matches),
--since/--until (a small explicit date grammar, see the
dateparse submodule), and --no-merges/--first-parent — are
applied to the walk before -n’s limit, so the limit caps the
filtered result like git’s does. --first-parent prunes the walk
itself (a merged side branch never enters the candidate set);
--no-merges only hides merge commits from the already-walked
output.
Argument parsing is delegated to clap-derive via
crate::clap_shim::parse; clap emits standard diagnostics on
errors and the shim maps them to mkit sysexits (USAGE for
unknown flags, DATAERR for malformed -n values, etc.).