It's worth noting that a lot of git's tooling supports --first-parent which only shows the "top level" commits in a branch. This means top level merge commits a

It's worth noting that a lot of git's tooling supports --first-parent which only shows the "top level" commits in a branch. This means top level merge commits and commits that aren't part of any merges into the branch you are looking at. Ex: For git log, this only shows you the commits that are merges and direct commits to the branch. For most repos this should correspond to individual patches/PRs/issues. It also sets the diff settings to use the same setting while in the log. For git show, this shows you the diff against the previous commit at the same "level" in the merge hierarchy. So on master this should generally show you the diff between pr47-merge and pr46-merge. If you step one level into the merge hierarchy and diff a merge commit from master into that feature branch (even if said feature branch has now been deleted but was merged into master), it'll show you the diff between that merge commit and the previous commit prior to that merge. For git bisect, it only tests against these top level commits before stopping. If your development requires that commits be rebased to functional commits prior to merge, this doesn't really change anything but for most merge-with-history style repos, this setting allows you to quickly identify where bugs are introduced.