gitk without X11

Question

It has been noted that Tcl/Tk, and in turn gitk now require X11 under Cygwin.

Having run it before and after this change it seems like extreme overkill. I use gitk very lightly, mostly sticking to simply command line git. How could I go about using gitk without X11, perhaps manually installing old version of Tcl/Tk?

Answer 1

You could use gitk from a non-Cygwin installation of git, which doesn't depend on Cygwin nor on X11.

Answer 2

try tig. You'll get the same thing in text form. I often use the form tig --all.

I also rely on git log --all --oneline --graph --decorate. I have a config setting that defaults --decorate to be implied so I don't need it when calling that command. With CTRL-R typing "all" usually gets me that from history so I don't have to type all that.

Or if you want to rely on a windowing system, gitk will be just fine from MSysGit. You can still use the keyboard to navigate it but may need to resort to the mouse as the focus in gitk is hard to see sometimes.