Blame
SmartGit’s Blame window displays the history information for a single file in a way that helps you to track down the commit in which a certain portion of code was introduced into the repository. You can open the Blame window by selecting a file in the Files view and invoking Query|Blame from the program menu. The Blame window consists of a Document view and a History of current line view.
Document view
The Document view is divided into three parts: some controls on top, a read-only text view on the right, and an info area on the left. With the controls on top, you can do two things: specify the View Commit at which the text view will display the file contents, and set how to Highlight the lines in the text view:
- Change Since The color chosen for a particular line reflects whether the line is ‘older’ or ‘newer’ than the specified Commit. More precisely, the color reflects whether the date when the line was last modified lies before or after the date of the commit.
- Age The color chosen for a particular line lies somewhere ‘between’ the two colors used for the oldest and the newest commit in which the file was modified, and thus reflects the line’s relative ‘age’. You can choose between two age criteria for determining the line color: either Commit Index which refers to the relative position in the relevant commit range (first commit, second commit, etc.) or Time which refers to the commit date, i.e. the point in time at which the commit was created.
- Author The color chosen for a particular line depends on the author who made the most recent modification to that line. Each author is mapped to a different color.
The info area shows the commit meta data in a compact format for each line and consists of following columns:
- SHA short SHA of the commit
- Status will display an ‘~‘-mark if the line has been modified (and not added) and/or an ‘M’ if the line has been introduced in a merge commit
- Author the initials or a short name of the author
- Date a compact display of the commit date
- Line number the number of the current line
More detailed information for a specific commit will be displayed in the tooltip, when hovering over the info area. The hyperlinks can be used to navigate to the specific commit.
History view
The History of current line view displays the ‘history’ of the currently selected line from the Document view: the ‘history’ consists of all detected past and future versions of the line, as it is present in the select View Commit. The position of the currently selected line from the Document view is denoted by pale borders surrounding the corresponding line in the History view.
The detection of a link between a past and a future version of a line depends on the changes which have happened in a commit:
- If a certain number of lines has been replaced by exactly the same number of lines within a commit, this change will be detected as modification of the corresponding lines and hence they will share the same history.
- If a certain number of lines has been replaced by larger or smaller number of lines, the detection of matching lines depends on the outcome of the internal compare algorithm. For the case where a line has been detected as removed in a commit (instead of replaced by another line, what might be more appropriate), the history contains a leading commit after line has been removed entry to which you can navigate. For the case where a line has been detected as added in a commit (instead of replacing another line, what might be more appropriate), the history contains a trailing commit before line has been added entry to which you can navigate.
Note
For lines having a ‘~‘-mark in the Document view, the History view will always show past commits.