Limit refs shown with git log --decorate

You cannot limit this out-of-the box. But nothing is stopping you from scripting the manipulation of .git/refs and then restoring it right after :).

No. If you're using decorate, it will use all available names as decorations. --decorate=short will reduce the clutter, but not reduce the total number of decorations you're going to be looking at.

You could write a script which decorates the output of git log yourself quite easily, if you need this specific functionality.

Starting with Git 2.16, the option --decorate-refs-exclude allows:

--decorate-refs= --decorate-refs-exclude=

If no --decorate-refs is given, pretend as if all refs were included. For each candidate, do not use it for decoration if it

matches any patterns given to --decorate-refs-exclude or if it doesn’t match any of the patterns given to --decorate-refs.