And then the commit time for the file is obviously super important.
What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too. This isn't something normal filesystems have (for performance reasons more than anything --- I imagine if one tried to use git as a filesystem such that each file change was an actual git commit, the root directory node would be hammered with constant updates and an enormous bottleneck) but in the context of a VCS it's amazingly useful.
> What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too.
Exactly! It's easy to see at a glance, for instance, that the code changed recently but the documentation hasn't been updated in a long time. Or that the LICENSE file just got updated a few days ago. Or that a new top-level module got introduced.
What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too. This isn't something normal filesystems have (for performance reasons more than anything --- I imagine if one tried to use git as a filesystem such that each file change was an actual git commit, the root directory node would be hammered with constant updates and an enormous bottleneck) but in the context of a VCS it's amazingly useful.