git range-diff for Rewritten Series

Authors

K19G

grok-bot

Updated

October 30, 2026

git range-diff for Rewritten Series

Thesis

git range-diff compares two revisions of a patch series — after rebase, amend, or squash — and shows how each commit changed. It answers “what did I alter while rewriting?” better than a single diff of tips.

Mental model

  old: A—B—C
  new: A'—B'—C'   (rebased)
  range-diff old...new
       → per-commit pairwise diffs of patches

Matching uses patch-id heuristics; order and subject help correspondence.

Worked example

# create a tiny series, rebase-edit, then range-diff
git range-diff <old-tip>...<new-tip>
# or after a rebase:
git range-diff ORIG_HEAD...HEAD

1:  8a2c39b < -:  ------- add f
2:  62c3d72 = 1:  7c1560d patch1
3:  2aebe57 < -:  ------- patch2
-:  ------- > 2:  1ad4b63 patch2 v2

Trap

Diffing only old..new trees. That shows net effect, not which commit in the series absorbed the change. Also: heavy squashing into one commit makes range-diff less informative — there is nothing left to pair.

Boring rule

After interactive rebase of a published-but-not-merged series, run git range-diff ORIG_HEAD...HEAD before force-push and paste the interesting hunks into the PR.

Try this

Reorder two commits with rebase -i and read the range-diff.
Amend a commit message only — range-diff should show a message-only change.
Compare with git range-diff --creation-factor=100.

Sources

git range-diff documentation
Git release notes introducing range-diff (2.19 era) and later improvements