git view-all-objects: reflog for the lazy

gistfile1.eclass

#!/bin/sh 

# This is a command to visualise all the commit objects in a git repository 
# in gitk. The benefit is that you see all of the orphaned commit objects 
# which you have left behind when rebasing or deleting branches.

# I was interested in this partly as an educational tool to show people how
# safe some of these history editing operations are, as the commits are all
# still there. I'm also keen to see how useful it is as a kind of visual
# alternative to the reflog command.  The reflog is awesome and I'm getting
# better at using it but sometimes I find it hard to see exactly where the SHA1
# that I'm trying to recover is. 

# This loads up gitk with an argcmd that will list the SHA1s of all of the objects 
# in a repository. This is overkill and will probably die or take forever on large 
# repositories but I don't know a nice way to list only the commit objects. 
# Plenty of room for improvement.

# Find the root directory of the git repos
topdir=`git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2> /dev/null`

# If that's failed we're not in a repository, so exit with a nice message
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
    echo Not in a git repository
    exit
fi

# Start gitk with an argcmd that lists every object in the repository
gitk --argscmd="find $topdir/.git/objects/?? -type f | sed -r \"s:($topdir/.git/objects/|/)::g\""