til/git/show-summary-stats-for-current-branch.md

Show Summary Stats For Current Branch

When I push a branch up to GitHub as a PR, there is a part of the UI that shows you how many lines you've added and removed for this branch. It bases that off the target branch which is typically your main branch.

The git diff command can provide those same stats right in the terminal. The key is to specify the --shortstat flag which tells git to exclude other diff output and only show:

• Number of files changed
• Number of insertions
• Number of deletions

Here is the summary stats for a branch I'm working on:

❯ git diff --shortstat main
 8 files changed, 773 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)

We have to be on our feature branch and then we point to the branch (or whatever ref) we want to diff against. Since I want to know how my feature branch compares to main, I specify that.

See man git-diff for more details.