git - Using emacs (and magit?) to visit a file in given commit/branch/etc

Question

If I want to see how foo.bar looked like in some certain commit <COMMIT_ID> then I can invoke:

git show <COMMIT_ID>:foo.bar

Nice... How can I do it in emacs? Using magit? Using vc? Say I am visiting the file foo.bar and I want to look up how it looked in <COMMIT_ID>.

Answer 1

The canonical way to do that in Emacs is to use VC: C-x v ~ from the file's buffer will ask you for a revision and then show that file as it was at that revision. It should work for any control system supported by VC, such as Git, Bzr, ...