Scan for todos in a git diff

When I’m working on a feature or refactor, I often leave @todo comments to remain in flow and deal with other points later.

I don’t mind committing them to my feature branch, as long as I work them away before merging in.

On large branches, it can be easy to forget about that todo I left in there a few days ago.

class PodcastController
{
    public function process(Podcast $podcast): void
    {
        $podcast->process();

        // @todo Broadcast event to trigger webhooks

        return $podcast;
    }

Before I merge, I pipe git diff into a grep call to scan for changes that include @todo.

git --no-pager diff main..feature-branch | grep -i "^\+[^$]*@todo"

+        // @todo Broadcast event to trigger webhooks

If you want to double check your changes before comitting, you can use the same command with git diff HEAD.

git --no-pager diff HEAD | grep -i "^\+[^$]*@todo"

Pouring this in a bash function

Here’s a quick bash function to scan for todos:

function todos() {
  git --no-pager diff ${1:"HEAD"} | grep -i "^\+[^$]*@todo"
}

Use it without an argument to look for todos you haven’t committed yet, or pass the revisions you want to compare between.

# Look at current changes
todos

# Look for todos added between main and feature-branch
todos main..feature-branch