Replace git's SHA with an index

Question

My colleague pointed out lately, that SVN refers to its commits with unique numbers. If I want to refer to a commit in Git, I know that I just have to copy a few of the SHA's digits, but even if a project has some thousands of commits, an increasing number would be easier to remember or even type.

Is it possible to let git list its commits like this:

0001 a258cb5 Latest commit
0002 373a4e2 previous one
0003 00f7c33 ...
0004 0bbc4da ...
0005 5b7eb09 ...

That way, you could refer to a commit with something like HEAD~3 instead of 00f7c33. Of course the number would change for every commit that is done, but I rarely refer to older commits, so the numbers would never be very large and easy to remember.

Tanks in advance

Answer 1

In git this does not make sense, as the commits are not really ordered. You can apply some changes from elsewhere and then forward merge others. I guess this applies to any distributed version control software.

Unless you manage your own list generated from the history, I'm afraid it's not possible.

If you look for a more readable way of uniquely identifying a change (not a number but some string that is human friendly), you can use the output of git describe. The format is:

last tag - # of commits since tag - g.id