Tig for Git

So you have been using git log for a bit to give you a graphical representation of your git commits like below, which is great if you have a mad appreciation of ascii art, and let’s face it when faced with a boring lecture, who didn’t get into it at some stage.

* | | cae63d5 - Merge branch 'master' of gitlab.com:gorails/jumpstart-pro (8 months ago) Chris Oliver
|\ \ \
| * \ \ 64bd2a1 - Merge branch 'tzdata-gem' into 'master' (8 months ago) Chris Oliver
| |\ \
| | * | | ccfdc01 - Rely on tzinfo-data instead of system package (8 months ago) Vlad Gorodetsky
| |/ / /
* / / / 1a96ed5 - Only add sentry-sidekiq if using sidekiq and sentry (8 months ago) Chris Oliver
|/ / /
* | | 0b09656 - Enable TailwindCSS JIT by default (8 months ago) Chris Oliver

The important take away here though is that there are tool out there other than ones like Git Kraken which I have used, but are not free for private repositories, which kind of makes them nerfed at ‘work’ as everything is on a private repo unless they will pay up the 💵 .

Enter the wonderous world of tig which is well and truely worth the price of admission ( it’s free 😃 ), and slide across the image below to see what you get straight out of the box.

graphical representation of your branches and commits same as git log.
commit author, timestamp & git commit message.
git diff & files change with lines altered.

tig == 😄 🔥 ✨

a time to tig

So let’s start to dig into just what exactly tig is and how it can help us in our day to day developer life.

From the Tig man page:

Tig is an ncurses-based text-mode interface for git(1). It functions mainly as a Git repository browser, but can also assist in staging changes for commit at chunk level and act as a pager for output from various Git commands.

So time to get cooking with tig for homebrew users you can use below, otherwise check out the install docs.

brew install tig

now what.. ?

Well time to dive into what tig can do, to browse your latest commits jump into your latest branch via the command line and type

tig or tig README.md for an individual file

and you will be greeted with UI similar to below depending on your terminal theme for colours, a list of all of your commits, you can navigate up with k and down with j

now you can ‘drill’ into this commits with a press of the enter key now as you can see below, you have access to the git diff also lines changed, holding down enter keeps you diving further through the diff until the end.

the blame game

Sometimes you want to find out who changed an individual file, and why 🤷

tig blame README.md

Will sort that for you, now you can go through line by line of the code and see the diff who authored the changes, when, the why? Well they might not be apparent straight off the bat, but hopefully you get there ( apologies if it is my code.. ).

is that it..?

Not in the slightest you might want to narrow the commits down to a specific date range, send below to tig:

tig --after="2021-05-23" --before="2021-12-01" -- README.md

stash the tig

Not sure how many, or what you have in your naughty git stash corner ? ( i know i never do.. ), we get a visual idea of what code you might have given up on by just using

tig stash

Hopefully that has given you an insight into tig and how this valuable tool can enhance your workflow, and give you greater clarity on just what is going on in that repo in front of you 🥰

references:

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