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Comment by aaronharnly | Hacker News Reader

I’ve long wanted what seems like a simple feature in GDocs: right click and “show me who wrote this”. All the data is there, and can eventually be determined by inspecting the history, but it’s not well exposed.

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I love how git calls this feature “blame” :)

Funny story, I was once in a company meeting and said something alone the lines of "blame is on X Engineer for that feature". Non technical product manager thought I was actually calling the guy out. Well sorta, but more technically.

$ git config --global alias.praise blame # Who wrote this most beautiful piece of.. code?

I thought something like that shipped by default, but I can't find it. I find git annotate though, a confusing almost doppelgänger to git blame.

SVN called it blame, before git. There might be other predecessors.

Apparently CVS had it, probably but not certainly before SVN https://linux.die.net/man/1/cvs

Strangely enough, this does seem to exist for Google Sheets:

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/73080/is-there-a...

I bet you money that 5 years from now this will be renamed to "attribute" or "authorship".

Jetbrain's IDEs label it as "annotate".

Though, I suspect that's intended as a generalization of the various VCS options they support.

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I do think it'd be good to move away from the negative connotation associated with blame. I want to know who to ask about some code, not who to blame for it breaking.

Annotate is used in Mercurial (and probably others).

CVS called it annotate back in the 90s.

Because of Linus's well documented concern for people's feelings?

It is happening to master -> main on github.

Linus does not control GitHub.

Care to take the bet then? 5 years to get 'blame' renamed?

No, but, if you remember, then you've got documented bragging rights when it happens.

I have bragging rights on putting my money where my mouth is today.

% git thank-profusely

you can use the versions feature and enable the detailed view to see who wrote any character over time. not as easy as right click, but you can definitely do it.

Sheets does it and it's so useful!

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