Question

How do I diff my working file version vs. some previous version in the remote repository?

Say, I pull today, perform 6 – 8 commits to my local copy and then want to see the diff between my latest working version ( of a given file ) and the latest on the remote or any other version.

Answer 1

If you’re talking about a remote branch, say, origin/master, you can use ~ and ^ to refer to ancestor commits relative to a branch the same way you can with local branches:

# what change was introduced to origin/master in the last 4 commits?
git diff origin/master origin/master~3

If you want to diff your current working directory against the 5th most recent commit on origin/master, you would omit the first argument:

git diff origin/master~4