Support reviewing merge commits (git show merge-commit)

By yves.goer... on March 21, 2015 23:28 (imported from Google Code)

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It seems TortoiseGit does not support merge commits in a special way. I've learned about how to review them in this article: (interesting read!)
http://haacked.com/archive/2014/02/21/reviewing-merge-commits/
The point is that when a merge has conflicts, only those conflict resolution changes need further review, or might be interesting otherwise. Automatic, unchanged merges have already been reviewed and should be just fine.

GitHub only shows the complete diff compared to both parents, not what changes the merge commit introduced itself over the two parents. Reading all of it would mean to review it a second time.

TortoiseGit doesn't show any special output. In the log window, I just get the changed files for both parents and can see the same full differences. I haven't found any context menu command to give me a smarter output.

Only the command 'git show <merge commit hash>' will print a diff of the changes that the merge has introduced itself. I'm interested in a GUI way to access this information. Especially because Git can't use the Windows console window. (It states the terminal is broken, and indeed it is. I can't scroll at all in the less-like viewer.) Piping the output through 'cat' to get the plain output is not very well readable either (line wrapping, no colours).