I often want to check all the changes made in my branch, relative to the base branch. Let’s say the base branch is master.

Most of the time, I use plain ol’ git diff.

git diff master
git diff master --name-only  # only list the changed files

However, git diff master doesn’t always work. For example, if I pulled the latest changes in master, and haven’t rebased my branch, then git diff master will show all kinds of changes I didn’t make.

So what is a dev to do?

git merge-base to the rescue!

Here’s the description from git help merge-base:

Find as good common ancestors as possible for a merge

The following gives me a good commit to compare against:

> git merge-base master HEAD
0783e77e5ca810e36fc7080753ac62526c09d0e4

Therefore, I can check all my changes using:

git diff `git merge-base master HEAD`

zsh function:

gdb() {
  git diff `git merge-base master HEAD` $@
}