$ git show | tig
This is the manual for tig, the ncurses-based text-mode interface for git. Tig allows you to browse changes in a git repository and can additionally act as a pager for output of various git commands. When used as a pager, it will display input from stdin and colorize it.
When browsing repositories, tig uses the underlying git commands to present the user with various views, such as summarized commit log and showing the commit with the log message, diffstat, and the diff.
If stdin is a pipe, any log or diff options will be ignored and the pager view will be opened loading data from stdin. The pager mode can be used for colorizing output from various git commands.
Example on how to colorize the output of git-show(1):
$ git show | tig
All git command options specified on the command line will be passed to the given command and all will be shell quoted before they are passed to the shell.
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Note
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If you specify options for the main view, you should not use the —pretty option as this option will be set automatically to the format expected by the main view. |
Example on how to open the log view and show both author and committer information:
$ tig log --pretty=fuller
See the "Specifying revisions" section below for an introduction to revision options supported by the git commands. For details on specific git command options, refer to the man page of the command in question.
Several options related to the interface with git can be configured via environment options.
Commits that are referenced by tags and branch heads will be marked by the reference name surrounded by [ and ]:
2006-03-26 19:42 Petr Baudis | [cogito-0.17.1] Cogito 0.17.1
If you want to filter out certain directories under .git/refs/, say tmp you can do it by setting the following variable:
$ TIG_LS_REMOTE="git ls-remote . | sed /\/tmp\//d" tig
Or set the variable permanently in your environment.
Set command for retrieving all repository references. The command should output data in the same format as git-ls-remote(1).
It is possible to alter which commands are used for the different views. If for example you prefer commits in the main view to be sorted by date and only show 500 commits, use:
$ TIG_MAIN_CMD="git log --date-order -n500 --pretty=raw %s" tig
Or set the variable permanently in your environment.
Notice, how %s is used to specify the commit reference. There can be a maximum of 5 %s ref specifications.
The command used for the diff view. By default, git show is used as a backend.
The command used for the log view. If you prefer to have both author and committer shown in the log view be sure to pass —pretty=fuller to git log.
The command used for the main view. Note, you must always specify the option: —pretty=raw since the main view parser expects to read that format.
The display consists of a status window on the last line of the screen and one or more views. The default is to only show one view at the time but it is possible to split both the main and log view to also show the commit diff.
If you are in the log view and press Enter when the current line is a commit line, such as:
commit 4d55caff4cc89335192f3e566004b4ceef572521
You will split the view so that the log view is displayed in the top window and the diff view in the bottom window. You can switch between the two views by pressing Tab. To maximize the log view again, simply press l.
The viewer keeps track of both what head and commit ID you are currently viewing. The commit ID will follow the cursor line and change everytime time you highlight a different commit. Whenever you reopen the diff view it will be reloaded, if the commit ID changed.
The head ID is used when opening the main and log view to indicate from what revision to show history.
tig(1) presents various views of a repository. Each view is based on output from an external command, most often git log, git diff, or git show.
Is the default view, and it shows a one line summary of each commit in the chosen list of revisions. The summary includes commit date, author, and the first line of the log message. Additionally, any repository references, such as tags, will be shown.
Presents a more rich view of the revision log showing the whole log message and the diffstat.
Shows either the diff of the current working tree, that is, what has changed since the last commit, or the commit diff complete with log message, diffstat and diff.
Is used for displaying both input from stdin and output from git commands entered in the internal prompt.
Displays key binding quick reference.
Each view has a title window which shows the name of the view, current commit ID if available, and where the view is positioned:
[main] c622eefaa485995320bc743431bae0d497b1d875 - commit 1 of 61 (1%)
By default, the title of the current view is highlighted using bold font. For long loading views (taking over 3 seconds) the time since loading started will be appended:
[main] 77d9e40fbcea3238015aea403e06f61542df9a31 - commit 1 of 779 (0%) 5s
Below the default key bindings are shown.
Switch to main view.
Switch to diff view.
Switch to log view.
Switch to pager view.
Show man page.
Close view, if multiple views are open it will jump back to the previous view in the view stack. If it is the last open view it will quit. Use Q to quit all views at once.
This key is "context sensitive" depending on what view you are currently in. When in log view on a commit line or in the main view, split the view and show the commit diff. In the diff view pressing Enter will simply scroll the view one line down.
Switch to next view.
This key is "context sensitive" and will move the cursor one line up. However, uf you opened a diff view from the main view (split- or full-screen) it will change the cursor to point to the previous commit in the main view and update the diff view to display it.
Similar to Up but will move down.
Move cursor one line up.
Move cursor one line down.
Move cursor one page up.
Move cursor one page down.
Jump to first line.
Jump to last line.
Scroll view one line up.
Scroll view one line down.
Scroll view one page up.
Scroll view one page down.
Quit.
Redraw screen.
Stop all background loading. This can be useful if you use tig(1) in a repository with a long history without limiting the revision log.
Show version.
Toggle line numbers on/off.
Toggle revision graph visualization on/off.
Open prompt. This allows you to specify what git command to run. Example:
:log -p
This section describes various ways to specify what revisions to display or otherwise limit the view to. tig(1) does not itself parse the described revision options so refer to the relevant git man pages for futher information. Relevant man pages besides git-log(1) are git-diff(1) and git-rev-list(1).
You can tune the interaction with git by making use of the options explained in this section. For example, by configuring the environment variables described in the "History commands" section.
If you are interested only in those revisions that made changes to a specific file (or even several files) list the files like this:
$ tig log Makefile README
To avoid ambiguity with repository references such as tag name, be sure to separate file names from other git options using "--". So if you have a file named master it will clash with the reference named master, and thus you will have to use:
$ tig log -- master
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Note
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For the main view, avoiding ambiguity will in some cases require you to specify two "--" options. The first will make tig(1) stop option processing and the latter will be passed to git log. |
To speed up interaction with git, you can limit the amount of commits to show both for the log and main view. Either limit by date using e.g. —since=1.month or limit by the number of commits using -n400.
If you are only interested in changed that happened between two dates you can use:
$ tig -- --after="May 5th" --before="2006-05-16 15:44"
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Note
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If you want to avoid having to quote dates containing spaces you can use "." instead, e.g. —after=May.5th. |
Alternatively, commits can be limited to a specific range, such as "all commits between tag-1.0 and tag-2.0". For example:
$ tig log tag-1.0..tag-2.0
This way of commit limiting makes it trivial to only browse the commits which haven't been pushed to a remote branch. Assuming origin is your upstream remote branch, using:
$ tig log origin..HEAD
will list what will be pushed to the remote branch. Optionally, the ending HEAD can be left out since it is implied.
Git interprets the range specifier "tag-1.0..tag-2.0" as "all commits reachable from tag-2.0 but not from tag-1.0". Where reachability refers to what commits are ancestors (or part of the history) of the branch or tagged revision in question.
If you prefer to specify which commit to preview in this way use the following:
$ tig log tag-2.0 ^tag-1.0
You can think of ^ as a negation operator. Using this alternate syntax, it is possible to further prune commits by specifying multiple branch cut offs.
Revisions options can to some degree be combined, which makes it possible to say "show at most 20 commits from within the last month that changed files under the Documentation/ directory."
$ tig -- --since=1.month -n20 -- Documentation/
In some cases, it can be useful to query changes across all references in a repository. An example is to ask "did any line of development in this repository change a particular file within the last week". This can be accomplished using:
$ tig -- --all --since=1.week -- Makefile
Known bugs and problems:
In it's current state tig is pretty much UTF-8 only.
If the screen width is very small the main view can draw outside the current view causing bad wrapping. Same goes for title and status windows.
The cursor can wrap-around on the last line and cause the window to scroll.
The prompt doesn't work while loading.
Copyright (c) 2006 Jonas Fonseca <fonseca@diku.dk>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Homepage: http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig
Releases: http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/releases
Git URL: http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/tig.git
Git porcelains:
Other git repository browsers:
gitk(1)
qgit(1)
gitview(1)