This way i don't need to count anything and stuff before
the earliest branch (in the example, ‘ack’) is never shown
to begin w/; instead, i move point to a ref (e.g., branch
name in square braces, or SHA1) and type ‘C-c C-s’.
That's most natural to me.  The compilation mode support
is to be able to likewise type ‘C-s C-s’ in *compilation*
on arbitrary shell command output (e.g., "git stash list"
or "git log --oneline -42").

The crux is func ‘more-vc-ref-at-point’, which could stand
to be improved, surely...

Anyway, i find "git log" to be only marginally useful (see
my previous grumblings re ChangeLog grepping) but that
will probably change, seeing where things are headed.
Nonetheless, i don't think manually counting commits will
ever be part of my workflow.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
   GPG key: 4C807502
   (if you're human and you know it)
      read my lisp: (responsep (questions 'technical)
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                     => nil