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In Magit log buffer commits (one per line) are shown with relative date. This is nice for recent commits, but makes little sense for older changes. In particular, this makes it annoyingly hard to relate commit dates to specific date, e.g. to find answer to question "which change might have broken the release on 3rd of April?".

Is it possible to somehow change the way commit dates are shown? I only found magit-duration-spec, but that's not exactly what I need.

2 Answers2

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This feature is now accessible through magit-log-margin. See this ticket and this commit.

GDP2
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  • Is there an example of how this variable should be set to show absolute date? – Liam Jul 22 '18 at 01:26
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    @Liam I don't see any examples, but [here's a section about it in the manual.](https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Log-Margin.html#Log-Margin) Mine is set to `(t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M " magit-log-margin-width t 18)`, which looks like [this](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GVNfw.png) in the Customize interface and the date looks like [this as a result.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VjnuF.png) – GDP2 Jul 23 '18 at 04:18
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If you need to be sure about the author and/or commit date of a particular commit, then you can always just show that commit in a separate buffer by pressing RET with point on that commit in the log.

But that's not very convenient if you have to do it a lot of course. I have started working on making this more flexible.

tarsius
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