Browsing history

History in the sidebar lists the repository’s commits, most recent first. Selecting one shows what it contains: its message, its metadata, the files it touched, and the diff of whichever of those you select.

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History is paginated and loaded progressively. A repository with a hundred thousand commits opens as quickly as one with four, because Innesta fetches a page at a time as you scroll rather than reading the lot before showing you anything.

The status bar says how many commits have been loaded so far.

Scoping without checking out

Clicking a local branch, a remote branch or a tag in the sidebar scopes the history to it. A tag shows the commit it points at and everything that led to it.

Nothing is checked out. That distinction is deliberate and worth relying on: looking at another branch’s history is something you do constantly, checking it out is something you do when you mean to work on it, and an app that conflated them would move your working copy every time you got curious. Checkout stays an explicit action.

What a commit shows

• The subject of the message.
• The author, the date, and the commit’s short hash.
• The files it changed, and a diff of each.

That is the header, with Revert Commit… at the end of it — Revert… when the window is too narrow for the longer name; the rest of the panel is the files and their diffs. For the full commit id, Copy Commit Hash is in the commit’s context menu, next to Copy Short Commit Hash.

From there you can compare it with something else, open its diff in the Diff Review window, or revert it.

A merge commit

A merge has more than one parent, so “what did this change?” has more than one answer. Innesta shows the one you usually want: what the merge brought into the branch it was made on — its first parent, the destination as it stood before.

Changes shown, in the commit’s header, picks another. Each option is one parent, by number and short hash: Parent 1 · 4b3d9c07 — Destination before merge, then a Parent 2 · a17f2e58 — Merged parent for each history the merge took in. The line beneath it says what the comparison you have chosen shows.

The choice stays with the commit you are reading: select another commit and the next merge opens on its first parent again. The Diff Review window carries the same picker.

An empty comparison says which one it is rather than showing a blank list: No changes compared with Parent 2 means the merge result and that parent are identical.