When using darcs you may want to be able to pick a patch from the log, and see its changes. How to achieve this wasn't particularly obvious to my git-oriented mind, so I thought I'd blog the answer.

Say we want to see the patch that is the third "away" from our current state. In darcs, we use a 1-indexed numbering scheme so the patch is #4 (since the current state is 1). To show the details of the patch, issue the simple command:

darcs log -n 4

If you're a git user, the equivalent revision is HEAD~3 (the third-generation grandparent of the current branch). To show the patch details in a similar fashion to darcs, execute:

git log -1 HEAD~3

To show a unified diff of the changes introduced in the revision/patch, the darcs command changes slightly to this:

darcs diff -u -n 4

whereas the git command changes to:

git log -1 -u HEAD~3

N.B. It is also possible to use darcs' interactive mode to view patch differences (including the ability to pick which patches to view, and which to skip). To do this, issue the command:

darcs log -i

and then show the chosen patch diffs by pressing the p key.