TL;DR

let g:fugitive_summary_format = "%<(16,trunc)%an || %s"

The path of figuring that line out

Vim-Fugitive is a great package. Recently I started to use :Glog command a lot to look at range of changes added to a branch after git pull.

:Glog <hash>..<another hash>

By default the command only shows a commit hash and its subject.

I really wanted to see how can I show a commit author name as well.

:h fugitive didn’t help much.

Inspecting the fugitive’s source code I came across not documented g:fugitive_summary_format variable. Initially it wasn’t clear how to use it what values I can assign to it but then I noticed that it is assigned with values like %s or %h %P\t%H.

These things looks familiar. man git-log - the place those control symbols can be found at. Searching by “author” gives us %an that we can use.

Let’s do let g:fugitive_summary_format = "%an" and see how does it look.

Nice… no commit message. By searching in man git-log I found %s which is a subject (first top line) part of a commit message.

Let’s do let g:fugitive_summary_format = "%an\t%s" (separate name and subject with a tab symbol)

Better but subject is not vertically aligned so let’s keep reading man git-log.

There is a subject Placeholders that affect formatting of later placeholders where you can find this scary expression - %<(<N>[,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])
The definition of this scary thing is - make the next placeholder take at least N columns, padding spaces on the right if necessary.

Exactly what we need. Let’s try to use it:

let g:fugitive_summary_format = "%<(16,trunc)%an || %s" - here I assume 16 chars in user name is enough for me to recognize an author. Adding || too as a separator between author and subject.

Much better!