By default, git has the git blame command to find out when a rule was modified and by whom. It is a very useful command, but its problem is that it gives the impression that someone is being blamed for something.

This is why I, along with many others before me, advocate renaming git blame to a friendlier alternative. A number of suggestions have already been made in the past:

  • git authorship
  • git trace
  • git praise
  • git inspect

I personally prefer the latter. It is incredibly neutral and easy to remember. He also does not give the impression that it is only about a person, as git authorship does. In fact, the function mainly gives information about the code itself.

Updating your git blame

Fortunately, it is enormously easy to rename your git blame to git inspect (or any other blame-free alternative). It’s a matter of registering an alias in your git configuration:

git config --global alias.inspect blame