How short can a Git hash be abbreviated?  A full SHA-1 hash is 160 bits, 40 hex characters, which is a bit long to talk about and retype when you’re not just copy-pasting.  Therefore most people will use just the first few characters to refer to commits, but how safe is this? I know of a couple posts where Linus Torvalds laments Git’s default hash abbreviation of 7 characters.  This gives you 28 unique bits, almost 270 million possibilities, which seems like it should be plenty.  Even with the L...