Selection Git History

Git history and diff for the selected lines of code — not just the whole file.

Select a method (or any range of lines), right-click → Git ▸ Show History for Selection, and get a list of only the commits that actually touched those lines. Click one and the diff opens scoped to that same fragment — not the whole file scrolled to wherever the first change happens to be.

A 15-line method selected in mautrix/telegram's pkg/connector/client.go. The file has 191 commits; five of them touched these lines, and those five are what the panel shows.

Why this exists

VS Code's built-in Git integration and the Marketplace's own Show History for Selected Code let a selection filter the commit list — but the diff you get when you click a commit is still for the entire file: you select ten lines, and you're back to scrolling a hundred-line diff to find the one hunk that matters.

Selection Git History opens the diff for just the selected fragment. That's the whole reason it exists.

If you moved from JetBrains IDEs, this is the Show History for Selection you are missing in VS Code.

Features

Everything below is implemented and shipping in this version — nothing here is aspirational (see Roadmap for what isn't built yet).

Git submenu

Right-click in the editor, in the Explorer, or on an editor tab:

Both history commands open the Git History panel at the bottom of the editor (next to Problems / Output / Terminal).

History panel

• Paginated commit list — a Load N more node fetches the next page (page size is configurable).
• A banner above the list always states what you're looking at: file history or selection history, which file, which lines.
• Expand a commit to see the files it touched (git show --diff-merges=first-parent --name-status); can be turned off.
• Hover a commit for its full date, author name and email, refs, and complete commit message; the visible label uses the relative-or-absolute format from settings, the hover is always the full absolute date.
• Merge commits get a distinct icon (git-merge vs git-commit).
• Click a commit (or use Show Diff from its context menu) to open its diff:
  • from file history, the whole-file diff, <parent> ↔ <commit>;
  • from selection history, the diff of just the tracked fragment — the actual point of this extension. See Known limitations for when this falls back to a whole-file diff.
  • the first commit of a file (no parent) diffs against an empty left side instead of failing.
  • renamed files are followed to their old path on each side automatically.
• Copy Revision Number and Copy Message from a commit's context menu.
• Refresh button in the panel toolbar.
• Follow Active Editor / Stop Following Active Editor toggle in the panel toolbar — off by default, so the panel stays pinned to the file it was invoked on (this matches the JetBrains default). Turn it on to have the panel switch automatically as you change the active editor.
• The panel refreshes itself after you commit or check out, through the built-in Git extension's API — see Known limitations.

Commands hidden from the Command Palette

Four of the nine contributed commands (selectionHistory.openCommitDiff, selectionHistory.loadMoreHistory, selectionHistory.copyRevision, selectionHistory.copyCommitMessage) only make sense with a tree-node argument from the panel, so they're hidden from the Command Palette and only reachable from inside the Git History view itself.

Installation

From the Marketplace

Open the Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X / Cmd+Shift+X), search for Selection Git History, and install — or go directly to marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yessaliyev.selection-git-history.

From a .vsix

From a checkout of this repository:

npm ci
npm run package
code --install-extension selection-git-history-*.vsix

npm run package produces selection-git-history-<version>.vsix in the repository root (the version comes from package.json). It always packages a release build: vsce runs the vscode:prepublish script automatically before collecting files, and that script rebuilds dist/extension.js in release mode (minified, no source map) regardless of what a previous npm run build left there.

Requirements

• Git 2.31 or newer. Expanding a commit node in the history panel — to show which files it touched — runs git show --diff-merges=first-parent, a flag introduced in Git 2.31 (it makes a merge commit's file list behave like a regular commit's, instead of coming back empty). An older git doesn't recognize the flag, so that file list won't load: you get a readable error node instead of a silent blank one, but it won't load.
• Git reachable via PATH, or an explicit path in selectionHistory.gitPath. Resolution order: selectionHistory.gitPath → the built-in Git extension's git.path setting → git on PATH.
• VS Code 1.85 or newer.

Settings

Keyboard shortcuts

None are bound by default — any choice would conflict with someone's existing habits. Add your own via Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON):

[
  { "key": "alt+cmd+h", "command": "selectionHistory.showHistory", "when": "editorTextFocus" },
  { "key": "alt+cmd+shift+h", "command": "selectionHistory.showHistoryForSelection", "when": "editorTextFocus" }
]

On Windows/Linux, swap cmd for ctrl (or bind through the Keyboard Shortcuts UI, which picks the right modifier for your OS automatically).

Known limitations

These are deliberate, understood behaviors — not bugs waiting to be triaged:

1. Show History for Selection requires a saved file. git log -L counts line numbers against HEAD and the content on disk — it has no visibility into the editor's buffer. If the file has unsaved changes, the extension asks whether to save it first rather than showing history for the wrong lines.
2. Lines added locally and not yet committed have no history. If your selection is entirely made of uncommitted lines, the extension says so plainly instead of showing the history of whatever lines happen to be nearby.
3. Line numbers in a selection diff start at 1, not at the line's real position in the file. The diff for a fragment is a document containing only those lines; VS Code numbers whatever content it's given, from the top of that document.
4. A commit that both renames a file and edits a tracked line stops that line's history there. git log -L treats such a commit as the start of the line's history and doesn't trace it further back through the rename — this is Git's own behavior, not a bug in this extension.
5. A merge commit may not have a fragment diff. When it doesn't, clicking it in selection history falls back to a whole-file diff instead of failing.
6. The Git submenu is visible outside a git repository in the Explorer and on editor tabs (it's correctly hidden in the editor's own context menu). The visibility check runs against the active editor, not the file you actually right-clicked, so it can't be evaluated per-item in those two menus. Running a command on a file outside a repository shows a clear warning instead of doing nothing silently.
7. Setting changes apply to the panel after you press Refresh, not instantly to whatever's already rendered.
8. Auto-refresh after a commit relies on the built-in Git extension's API. If that extension is disabled, the panel only updates when you press Refresh yourself.

Roadmap

Not in this release — planned for a later one, with no committed date:

• Annotate — a JetBrains-style blame column in the editor gutter.
• Compare with… — compare the current file against a branch, a revision, or its latest committed version.
• Rollback — revert a file or a selection to an earlier revision through an undoable WorkspaceEdit, without touching the index.

Screenshots are also on the list — they'll be added in a future release.

Privacy

No telemetry, no analytics, no network calls of any kind, and zero runtime dependencies — the packaged extension is a single bundled dist/extension.js file. The only external process it ever talks to is the git binary already on your machine, run against the repository you asked about. For an extension that runs shell commands over other people's code, that seemed worth stating explicitly rather than leaving implicit.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to build, test, and the invariants the code depends on.

License

MIT