Here is a command that will list all of the server branches for the current Git repository, ordered from least recently edited to most recently edited, and with the latest author shown for each:

git branch -r --sort=creatordate \
    --format "%(creatordate:relative);%(committername);%(refname:lstrip=-1)" \
    | grep -v ";HEAD$" \
    | column -s ";" -t

If the column command is not available on your system,1 you can replace it with

    | sed -e "s/;/\t/g"

for a similar effect. Note also that you will need Git 2.13 (released in May 2017) or later.

Using the Jekyll repository as an example,2 the output will look like

6 years ago             Tom Preston-Werner  book
4 years, 4 months ago   Parker Moore        0.12.1-release
4 years ago             Matt Rogers         1.0-branch
3 years, 11 months ago  Matt Rogers         1.2_branch
3 years, 1 month ago    Parker Moore        v1-stable
12 months ago           Ben Balter          pages-as-documents
10 months ago           Jordon Bedwell      make-jekyll-parallel
6 months ago            Pat Hawks           to_integer
5 months ago            Parker Moore        3.4-stable-backport-5920
4 months ago            Parker Moore        yajl-ruby-2-4-patch
4 weeks ago             Parker Moore        3.4-stable
3 weeks ago             Parker Moore        rouge-1-and-2
19 hours ago            jekyllbot           master

Motivation

My most recent project at work had several contributors from multiple teams. I took it upon myself to periodically prune our branches, which meant that I needed to know who was responsible for each branch. BitBucket didn’t seem to show that information anywhere so I rigged up this command.

(By the way, I highly recommend GitUp for macOS if you’re interested in a novel way of visualizing your branches:

A screenshot of GitUp.

Be sure to turn on the options to show stale branch tips and remote branch tips.)

How it works

The git command lists all of the branches on the server,3 ordered from least recently edited to most recently edited. For each branch, it prints the relative timestamp of the latest commit; the name of the author of the latest commit; and the branch name. The grep command removes the “HEAD” pointer from the list, since it’s probably just pointing to one of the other branches in the list and we don’t need to show that branch twice. Finally, the column command puts the information into a nice tabular form.

  1. column is part of BSD, so it’s available on macOS. It’s available under Ubuntu if the “bsdmainutils” package is installed, which it seems to be by default. ↩︎

  2. I’ve omitted some of Jekyll’s branches for brevity. ↩︎

  3. To be precise, it lists all of the remote-tracking branches. If your local copy of the repo is up to date then this is the same as “all of the branches on the server.” ↩︎