Comparing commits

A diff between two commits answers a different question from a diff of one commit. “What did this change?” is one commit; “what is different between the release and what I have now?” is two.

Innesta does three kinds of comparison, all of them opening in the Diff Review window:

• Two selected commits. Select one, command-click another, and compare.
• A commit and its parent — the same thing as looking at the commit itself, said the other way round. On a merge the item reads Diff with First Parent, and the other parents are chosen in the commit’s own header.
• A commit and HEAD — how far your working position has moved from there, which is the comparison you want before deciding whether to merge something.

Reading one

The result is an ordinary diff, with the same layouts, the same context control, and the same syntax highlighting as any other. A file list on one side and the change on the other.

Order is not yours to get wrong. Innesta puts the older of the two on the left whichever you selected first — by date, and by position in the list when the dates are equal — so the diff always reads as what would have to happen to the earlier commit to make it the later one. The menu item names the pair in that order, as two short hashes with an arrow between them.