// the find
paulirish/git-recent
See your latest local git branches, formatted real fancy
A shell script that wraps fzf to give you an interactive branch switcher — type to filter recent branches, hit Enter to check out. It's a thin but well-executed glue layer for developers who live on the command line and find `git branch --sort=-committerdate` too ugly to use raw.
Authored by Paul Irish, so it's well-maintained and not abandonware. The fzf integration in 2.0 is the right call — fzf does the heavy UI lifting and the script stays tiny. Worktree support is a thoughtful addition that most similar tools skip. The fallback to `git recent-og` for dependency-averse users shows real-world pragmatism.
This is essentially a one-liner wrapper around `git branch --sort=-committerdate | fzf`; there's not much here that justifies a dedicated install for anyone already comfortable with fzf's shell integration. The `ctrl-o` diff view opens in a subshell and exits on keypress, which breaks muscle memory if you want to stay in the diff. No remote branch support — if you're working across multiple remotes, you're out of luck. 1031 stars for what is genuinely 40 lines of shell suggests most of the audience discovered it before fzf was ubiquitous.