When I push a branch up to GitHub as a PR, there is a part of the UI that shows
you how many lines you've added and removed for this branch. It bases that off
the target branch which is typically your main branch.
The git diff command can provide those same stats right in the terminal. The
key is to specify the --shortstat flag which tells git to exclude other diff
output and only show:
- Number of files changed
- Number of insertions
- Number of deletions
Here is the summary stats for a branch I'm working on:
❯ git diff --shortstat main
8 files changed, 773 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)We have to be on our feature branch and then we point to the branch (or whatever
ref) we want to diff against. Since I want to know how my feature branch
compares to main, I specify that.
See man git-diff for more details.