Use VSCode Source Control tab to view changes between git commits

In the version of VSCode I am using (1.65), The source control tab seems to be focused only on current uncommitted changes. If I edit a file, it shows up under the source control dropdown and shows a nice graphic of the changes made. I would like to use this graphic to show the differences between the previous commit and the current commit instead of the current commit and uncommitted items. Basically, I want all of the information from "git show HEAD" to be displayed in the nice VSCode source control graphic interface. I cannot install more programs, so "use a git gui client" isn't an option for me.

I know that there is a "Timeline" feature that already exists, but this works on a file-by-file basis. I do not know which files were changed in the previous commit, so the timeline feature is useless to me unless I comb through everything in my repository.

If this is easy to do or already an existing feature that I didn't see, please stop reading and give your response. My attempted solution below is a gross workaround.

How I tried to solve this problem was by trying to "decommit" the most recent changes, so that my repo thinks it's at HEAD-1 but all of the changes made in HEAD are there and uncommitted. I could not find a simple command to do this, so instead I did the following in linux starting from the base directory of the repository:

cd ..
mkdir temp_repo
cp -r ./repo/. ./temp_repo/     #move everything to temporary folder
cd temp_repo
rm -rf .git                     #delete git information from temp folder
cd ../repo
git checkout previous_version   #switch to previous version
find . ! -name "*.git" -delete  #delete everything except git info
cp -r ../temp_repo/. .

Basically, I copied the current version of the repo into a temporary folder, removed the git information from that temporary folder, then checked out the repo to the old version. In the old version, I tried to delete everything except for the git information, and then copy the contents of the temporary folder back in. I hoped that with the git information from the previous version but the files of the current version, git would recognize everything that changed in the new version as uncommitted changes.

This approach almost works. If I skip the second to last command deleting every non-git item from the previous version of the repo, git does what I want and VSCode source control shows all of the changes as changes. The only problem is that if one of the changes was deleting a file, this method will not show that, and I need it to. That's why I tried deleting everything except git information before copying the new version in, but it didn't work and git stopped recognizing /repo/ as a git repository despite the .git file being in there.

If there is a better way to "decommit" the most recent changes like I described I'd love to hear it. If not, is there a way to make my solution work? I.e. what command could I use instead of find . ! -name "*.git" -delete that would remove all of the source files while preserving git information?

It is not using the source control tab, but this is a solution that gets very close to the desired functionality.

First, edit your git settings to make VSCode the default tool for the git difftool command. Run:

git config --global -e

to edit the git config, and paste these settings in:

[core]
  editor = code --wait
[diff]
  tool = vscode
[difftool "vscode"]
  cmd = code --wait --diff $LOCAL $REMOTE
[merge]
  tool = vscode
[mergetool "vscode"]
  cmd = code --wait $MERGED

Now, find the two commit IDs you wish to compare in VSCode, you can find the most recent commits with git log

Run the command: (It makes the most in sense if commit 1 is the older of the two.)

git difftool --dir-dif (commit ID 1) (commit ID 2)

You will get a VSCode explorer window with two folders, one for each commit. These folders will only contain files that have changed.

To get individual changes between files, first right click the file you want in the top folder called "left" and choose the "select for compare" option. Then, right click the same file in the "right" folder and choose "compare with selected". You will get a window that shows all the changes that were made between the two commits.