Git Cherry

git cherry compares a range of commits against an upstream and prints only the ones that are not already there. It answers a specific question: of the commits on my branch, which still need to go somewhere else?

It works by comparing patch ids rather than commit hashes. Two commits that produce the same diff get the same patch id, whatever their hashes, so a commit you cherry-picked, rebased or reapplied is recognised as already-present. That is the part git log --left-right cannot do.

The shape

git cherry <upstream> <head>

Usually the upstream is a remote branch:

git cherry -v origin/main feature-search

A - means no equivalent exists upstream, so the commit is unique to your branch and still needs porting. A + means an equivalent is already there.

The use: a patch series against a moved base

Rebase, cherry-pick and git format-patch all produce the situation where you have a series of patches meant for a branch that has moved on:

git cherry -v upstream/v1.4 1.4-backports

Every line with a - is a commit that is not upstream. Re-generate only those, and your backport contains nothing that was already merged.

The use: finding unmerged work

git cherry -v origin/main HEAD

A quick audit of how far your branch has diverged in substance rather than in history. It is also the check to run before opening a pull request that was based on a fork that has since moved.

Why not just diff

git diff main...topic compares the trees and shows the aggregate result. If a commit was merged upstream and then reverted, or cherry-picked and then squashed, the diff is empty while your branch still has commits to integrate. git cherry compares each commit individually and does not care whether the net effect is already present.

Caveats

Patch identity is a heuristic based on the diff, so two genuinely different commits that happen to produce identical diffs are treated as the same, and a commit whose message-only change produces an empty diff is always considered already applied. It answers "is this change already upstream", not "did this commit".

To see the comparison in full — which commit matched which, and what changed where it did not — use Git Range Diff.