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Viewing a file as of any Git revision @ 06 Jul 2012

When working with code in a Git repository, it is often instructive to view the contents of a file as of a different revision.

Git makes this easy:

% git show ${revision}:${path_to_file}

${path_from_repo_root} is the path to the file from the "root" of the repository (the directory where the repo's .git subdirectory lives). ${revision} specifies the Git revision (see git help gitrevisions) at which you'd like to see the file contents.

If you're a Vim user, you can easily view the file in a Vim buffer – and with syntax highlighting. Assuming that the Vim-recognized filetype specification is ${filetype}, the following will do the trick:

% git show ${revision}:${path_to_file} | vim -R -c "set ft=${filetype}" -