Counting Commits per Author with git shortlog

This lesson covers checking commit counts per author with git shortlog. It's for anyone searching "git shortlog usage."

git shortlog groups your commit history by author and shows each one's commit count and list of messages. Handy for getting a sense of who's changing things, and how often.

In Try It, run git shortlog. Commits organized and grouped by author, along with their names, are displayed neatly.

A common early mistake is not distinguishing this from a regular git log — git log displays chronologically, while git shortlog aggregates and organizes by author instead, which is the key difference in role. In real teams, this command sometimes gets used to get a rough sense of project contribution, or as reference material when writing release notes.