I keep too many branches alive when I’m working on Chatwoot. A day later I forget the exact names and end up grepping through git branch output. I wrote a tiny helper in Fish to show me the branches I touched in the last 24 hours:

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function gbt --description 'List git branches updated/created in the last 24 hours'
    git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format='%(committerdate:iso8601) %(refname:short)' refs/heads/ | \
    while read -l date time zone branch
        set -l commit_time (date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z" "$date $time $zone" +%s 2>/dev/null)
        set -l now (date +%s)
        set -l diff (math $now - $commit_time)
        if test $diff -le 86400
            echo "$date $time $branch"
        end
    end
end

What it does

  • git for-each-ref prints every local branch with its committer timestamp, most recent first.
  • read -l date time zone branch splits that line into pieces so I can get the timestamp and branch name cleanly.
  • date -d "$date $time $zone" +%s (GNU date on Linux) turns the ISO timestamp into epoch seconds.
  • I subtract that from date +%s for “now” and keep anything under 86,400 seconds—24 hours.
  • The output is a short list I can scan:

macOS note

The BSD date on macOS doesn’t support -d. Swap the commit_time line for:

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set -l commit_time (date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z" "$date $time $zone" +%s 2>/dev/null)

Or brew install coreutils and use gdate -d "$date $time $zone" +%s to match the Linux version. Everything else stays the same.

$ gbt
2025-08-26 19:14:55 cx-app-perf
2025-08-26 10:02:07 fix-shift-threads
2025-08-26 08:41:33 remove-old-flows

That’s enough to remind me where I should jump back in, and it’s a good nudge that I probably need to graduate these into separate worktrees soon.