How to exit git log or git diff

Actually, there are three ways to do it, precisely.

Type any of the following 3 commands.

1. :q
2. :z or
3. Ctrl + z

P.S.: Sometimes, for someone, one of these options doesn't seem to work and for others it works.

You're in the less program, which makes the output of git log scrollable.

Type q to exit this screen. Type h to get help.

If you don't want to read the output in a pager and want it to be just printed to the terminal define the environment variable GIT_PAGER to cat or set core.pager to cat (execute git config --global core.pager cat).