For my (Debian Jessie) version of git, the default color for displaying the commit hash in the "git log" output is yellow. That is a bad choice on normal terminals like mine with a white background because it makes the commit hash (extremely important and useful information) virtually unreadable. So I found myself using
git log |less quite a bit which suppresses the colours, but I finally got tired of such workarounds today, and started googling for the answer which turned out to be extremely difficult to find because there are other aspects of the git log information (especially decoration and pretty formats) where users are fascinated with setting the color, but all that information doesn't help for setting the color for the key information in the log, the commit hash. Eventually, though I did find the solution which is to run the following command: git config --global color.diff.commit "yellow black" which improved visibility tremendously because that yellow foreground is now seen against a black background. Another alternative with good visibility (at least for my terminal) is git config --global color.diff.commit red i.e., red on the terminal background (white for me). But other foreground and background colors are possible as well. For my version of git (2.1.4), the only color choices appear to be normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white. However, if you have git-2.3.0 or later it appears from web commentary that 24-bit hex colors will be recognized, e.g., '#FF0000' instead of red if you have a terminal that supports those. By the way, to those here wondering why the configuration item color.diff.commit has anything to do with the color of the commit hash displayed in the git log command, "git help config" does mention the git log command for the color.diff configuration item so I guess you can infer that color.diff.commit controls the commit hash color for git log, but that inference is not completely obvious so that is why I didn't come up with this solution myself and had to use a long detailed google search to find it. I hope this solution helps those here who are currently having trouble with the visibility of the default yellow color on terminal background for displays of commit hashes. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
