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:

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