Unable to show a Git tree in terminal

Question

Killswitchcollective.com's old article, 30 June 2009, has the following inputs and outputs

git co master
git merge [your_branch]
git push

upstream    A-B-C-D-E            A-B-C-D-E-F-G
                 \        ---->               \
your branch       C-D-E                        G

I am interested how you get the tree like-view of commits in your terminal without using Gitk or Gitx in OS/X.

How can you get the tree-like view of commits in terminal?

Answer 1

How can you get the tree-like view of commits in terminal?

git log --graph --oneline --all

is a good start.

You may get some strange letters. They are ASCII codes for colors and structure. To solve this problem add the following to your .bashrc:

export LESS="-R"

such that you do not need use Tig's ASCII filter by

git log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit | tig   // Masi needed this 

The article text-based graph from Git-ready contains other options:

git log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

Regarding the article you mention, I would go with Pod's answer: ad-hoc hand-made output.

---

Jakub Narębski mentions in the comments tig, a ncurses-based text-mode interface for git. See their releases.
It added a --graph option back in 2007.

Answer 2

A solution is to create an Alias in your .gitconfig and call it easily:

[alias]
    tree = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

And when you call it next time, you'll use:

git tree

To put it in your ~/.gitconfig without having to edit it, you can do:

git config --global alias.tree "log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit"  

(If you don't use the --global it will put it in the .git/config of your current repo.)

Answer 3

git log --oneline --decorate --all --graph

A visual tree with branch names included.

Use this to add it as an alias

git config --global alias.tree "log --oneline --decorate --all --graph"

You call it with

git tree

Answer 4

tig

If you want a interactive tree, you can use tig. It can be installed by brew on OSX and apt-get in Linux.

brew install tig
tig

This is what you get:

Answer 5

Keeping your commands short will make them easier to remember:

git log --graph --oneline

Answer 6

I would suggest anyone to write down the full command

git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph

rather than create an alias.

It's good to get the commands into your head, so you know it by heart i.e. do not depend on aliases when you change machines.