Usage discussion from the GNU Emacs project.

[Ian Clatworthy]

Óscar Fuentes wrote:

> I'm more concerned about speed of operations such as `log' etc. I tend
> to dismiss git's propaganda about its millisecond-class speed but,
> honestly, it really makes a difference when the dataset grows and/or the
> CPU shrinks.

Agreed. The operations that matter most are:

* status
* diff
* commit
* log
* pull
* creating a new feature branch
* push or send (depending on workflow).

Commit, log, pull and push have all received a fair amount of attention
this year. There's more work to do on log, particularly 'log file' and
'file dir'. We also have room to make status and diff quicker. I put
some rough patches up months ago for some of these issues but they
didn't get through review. I can dig them up if someone wants to polish
them and get them landed.

Returning to log speed, I use a handful of log aliases 100x more than
log itself. My bazaar.conf file includes:

[ALIASES]
tip = log -r-1 -n1
top = log -l10 --line
show = log -v -p -n1 --long

In particular, I use 'top' heavily. All of these are fast operations,
even on large repositories. Output should begin immediately as well.

I also highly recommend using qlog instead of log. Fire it up once and
refresh it as required. It's *so* much easier & faster exploring history
using qlog than log.

Is it worth adding tips like above to the Emacs developer documentation?

Ian C.