View the change history of a file using Git versioning

Question

How can I view the change history of an individual file in Git, complete details with what has changed?

I have got as far as:

git log -- [filename] 

which shows me the commit history of the file, but how do I get at the content of each of the file changes?

I'm trying to make the transition from Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and that used to be a simple right-click → Show history.

Answer 1

For a graphical view I'd use gitk:

gitk [filename] 

Or to follow filename past renames:

gitk --follow [filename] 

Answer 2

You can use

git log -p -- filename 

to let Git generate the patches for each log entry.

See

git help log 

for more options - it can actually do a lot of nice things :) To get just the diff for a specific commit you can

git show HEAD 

or any other revision by identifier. Or use

gitk 

to browse the changes visually.