August 24, 2026 9:55 AM I have too many git branches and like many people I developed a convoluted script to show me the most recent ones. I ran this command many times a day for years: function branches { for k in ` git branch | sed " s/^..// "` ; do echo -e ` git log --color -1 --pretty=format: " %Cgreen%ci %Cblue%cr%Creset " " $k "` \\t " $k " ; done | sort } This outputs the date as the first column in the output so that sort works. Turns out with modern git it’s totally unnecessary. Just configure git branch to sort by the last commit date: git config branch.sort committerdate You can also supply this on a one-off basis as git branch --sort committerdate . What else can you sort by? The manual says “The keys supported are the same as those in git-for-each-ref(1) .” The manpage for git-for-each-ref lists a ton of fields, including some that don’t make sense to me as sort keys.…