Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS

> None of these are the most efficient way to do this (you can use git show and git log -S or maybe git grep to accomplish something similar), but personally I always forget the syntax and navigating a filesystem feels easier to me.

i feel like some of the old-school commands will benefit from long args, e.g., '--search'. at the time of writing, the current `git log` documentation[1]'s `-S' has _one_ instance of the word 'search'.

(un)related to the article, author went on to contribute documentation updates to git, which were much needed [2]

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt--... [2]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/01/08/a-data-model-for-git/

FTA: “problem 1: webdav or NFS?

The two filesystems I could that were natively supported by Mac OS were WebDav and NFS. I couldn’t tell which would be easier to implement so I just tried both”

I might find out that it is incomplete, buggy or a nuisance to use, but FSKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FSKit) would be my first choice.

Related: Fossil has a `fusefs` subcommand: https://fossil-scm.org/home/help/fusefs

The DIRECTORY/checkins/ directory doesn't list out anything by itself, but you can look things up by any of the supported checkin names (hash, tag, branch, date...): https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/checkin_names.wiki

Nice idea. But when taking commits as folders one should delete, add and remame files in the folder and that is not possible in a commit because it creates another commit. So I think this is nit the right mental model

BTW, if you want a simple NFSv4 client in Go, feel free to use mine: https://github.com/Cyberax/go-nfs-client

Making it into an NFSv4 server should also be pretty easy.

Given the advent of LLMs and agentic coding, I believe this article needs re-visiting as it makes it much more discoverable to compare individual files across commits.

NFS.. stop right there