Today I was using Git blame trying to work out who changed a line of code. I kept hitting a wall because the last commit was actually a mass code formatting commit. I thought to myself—there must be a way to skip these commits. It turns out there is!
Git has an option --ignore-rev <rev>. From the documentation:
Ignore changes made by the revision when assigning blame, as if the change never happened. Lines that were changed or added by an ignored commit will be blamed on the previous commit that changed that line or nearby lines...
You can use ---ignore-rev several times for multiple commits, but there is also a flag for specifying a file where you can list the rev ids --ignore-revs-file.
Ignore revisions listed in file, which must be in the same format as an fsck.skipList. This option may be repeated, and these files will be processed after any files specified with the blame.ignoreRevsFile config option. An empty file name, "", will clear the list of revs from previously processed files.
As helpful as the flag is, I use a Vim plugin for Git blame. I needed a way to configure it easily for all blames within the project. As you may have noticed from the documentation, you can also set this via a config option. blame.ignoreRevsFile.
In the project in question, simply run:
git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs
(note lack of --global, only applies to this project).
Create a file in the root named .git-blame-ignore-revs and list all the commit revs you wish to ignore. Note they must be the full-hash. Which you can find with:
git rev-parse eeccbf39
As we don't wish to commit this file (unless the team want to), we should ignore this file. To ignore just in our copy of the repo, open up .git/info/exclude and add the filename in the same format as the usual .gitignore.
That's it. You're done.