Browse and display files in a git repo without cloning

Git is distributed version control system, while Subversion is centralized (client-server) version control system. They work differently; get used to that. Please read my answer explaining the consequences of that difference to git equivalent of svn status -u question at StackOverflow.

Repeating myself a bit: in centralized version control system (like CVS or Subversion) almost all commands are processed on server, and involve network. Very few commands are performed locally. Note that to have good performance of "svn status" and "svn diff" Subversion stores 'pristine copy' of checked-out version on client, to not have to involve network transfer for those common operations (this means that Subversion checkout = 2 x size of working directory at least).

In distributed version control system (like Git, Mercurial or Bazaar), where you have local copy (clone) of a whole repository, almost all commands are performed on client. Very few commands require network connection to other repository (to server).

The number of command you can perform on server is limited.

• You can list all references on remote with "git ls-remote <URL>".
• You can get snapshot of (part) of repository (if remote server enabled it) with
  "git archive --remote=<URL> HEAD".
• You can clone only a few last commits (so called "shallow clone") with
  "git clone --depth=1 <URL>".
• If server provides git web interface to repository, you can use it to browse.

The command you want is git ls-remote which allows you to get some information about remote repositories, but you cant show history or list directories or anything of that level: essentially it only lets you see the remote objects at a very high-level (you can see the current HEADs and tags for example).

The only real way to do what you want (if I understand correctly) would be to use ssh to run a remote command and return the results, for example:

ssh me@otherhost "cd repo && git log -n 10"

What you want would be lovely functionality if they could add it, but from what I read it's not very easy since getting history etc needs a lot of information to be local to git, and at that point you may as well have done a git fetch.