Use Git Logs to Search for Deleted Content

If you’ve ever accidentally deleted something from a file and want to recover it using git you can search the full history for a string.

This will return any commit that includes the string in the diff:

git log -i -p -S "my search term here"

I’ve used this several times now to recover some previous code and prose I had written many commits ago.

See also

• This is especially useful not that I use git as the backend for org-roam mobile
• Working Copy is surprisingly useful for bringing git workflows to iOS