I just want to get a quick glance at the history of a project by having git log show only the commit date, nothing else. How can we best do that?
It turns out I was actually asking for the author date, which is what is shown by git log. To see the committer date too, which can be different, run git log --pretty=fuller.
See also here: Why is git AuthorDate different from CommitDate?
To help make this point that there are different dates: to set an author date when running git commit, use:
git commit ---date "<date>"
To set also the committer date, you'd have to do:
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="<date>" git commit --date "<date>"
See here: How can one change the timestamp of an old commit in Git?
If you want to see only the committer date (the date the commit was written with it's current ID):
git log --format=%cd
If you want to see only the author date (the date the commit was originally written, but may differ from the committer date if the commit was amended, rebased, cherry-picked, etc, which caused it to get a new commit ID):
git log --format=%ad
More info on the difference between committer and author dates: Why git AuthorDate is different from CommitDate?.
Dates can be displayed in different ways. Here's a list of built-in options.
Also, if you don't want to use a pager, just add --no-pager after the git command, like this:
git --no-pager log --format=%ad