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There is git branch -r to list all remote branches.

I wonder if there is away to list all remote branches, but order them by number of commits (eg., the branch with most commits is listed first).

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  • I don't know how to sort git branch as you'd like, but as a step in the right direction this is how you can determine how many commits are on each branch Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 12:00
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    There is nothing built in. You could build it easily enough, using git for-each-ref, git rev-list --count, and the sort program. The result would not be very useful though as the count of commits on a branch is hardly ever worthwhile: a new branch, just created right now from master, has every commit that master has. (You probably want to redefine "how many commits" as something like "how many unique commits", perhaps.) Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 12:00
  • @torek "the count of commits on a branch is hardly ever worthwhile" I guess one usage is that it can filter out unused/obsolete branches (that have very commits) and tidy up the repo. That's a reason I asked. I'll try out your suggestions Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 12:07
  • @artm: See VonC's answer for one way to count commits across a symmetric difference between two branches. The more common expression is git rev-list --count X..Y (two dots rather than three): X..Y means Y ^X which means "the set of all commits on Y minus the set of all commits on X" (i.e., set subtraction), and --count then counts the number of elements in that set. Here Y is the branch you want to count, but you must also name some other branch X, otherwise in a typical repository with tens of thousands of commits, you will find tens of thousands of commits on every branch. Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 20:55

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I guess one usage is that it can filter out unused/obsolete branches (that have very commits) and tidy up the repo

That is what you see in the "branches" tab section of a GitHub project:

Example for git/git/branches:

git/git/branches

What you want is not the number of commits, but, for a given branch acting as reference, the number of commit ahead and behind that branch.

git rev-list --left-right --count master...test-branch

That way you can see the one behind that could be safely removed.
Note that you can already list those merged branches with:

git branch --merged master

With Git 2.5, you can also list local branches compared to their remote tracking branches (not your case, but can be useful):

git fetch git for-each-ref --format="%(push:track)" refs/heads
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Interesting, I never knew --count could be combined with --left-right to count the left and right sides of the symmetric difference!
@torek I still feel, after seeing the kind of shorthand like %(push:track), there should be a shorthand for that kind of behind/ahead display between two branches.
Well, there is (sort of), but only for @{u}, and it's git status :-) The @{upstream} syntax is not very pretty, but the only alternative I know of is Mercurial's generalized expression parser, which is heavy-weight. It has great power, but with shell vagaries requiring quoting, it's pretty klunky syntactically too.
Thanks @VonC . The ahead/behind info you provided is great. I also wanted to know which branches have only one or two commits - that way I can indentify those branches that had been created but not used and delete them. Some old branches can be a lot behind master but their commits may still be useful to keep.
@artm those same command will do that: a branch has one or two commits compared to another branch.

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