I have been using git on most of my hobby projects for quite some time. I prefer the command line when possible, however, it is nice to visualize certain operations. SourceTree and Github’s Windows and Mac apps are very nice but I’m mostly on Ubuntu when using git. Gitk is a decent option but sometimes tools such as this and the aforementioned GUI tools can be a bit over-the-top for a command line junkie such as myself. Something between the command line and full blown windowed GUI applications would be great; this seems to be where tig comes in.

Tig has been around for a little while now but it just came across my radar via an excellent post on Atlassian’s blog by Antoine Büsch (as a side note, it’s kinda cool to see this post on Atlassian’s blog considering they make SourceTree). Antoine listed some compelling reasons for using tig but I was sold when he related tig to vim versus other development tools :)

To install tig on Ubuntu just open up a command line and run the obvious apt-get install tig. From there, navigate to a directory under source control (with git) and type tig — you should see the main log view. Pressing ‘h’ will bring up help to see a list of available commands. You can stage changes by pressing ‘c’. For a more exhaustive list of commands, check out the official tig manual.