The Tig Manual

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):

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.

Example on how to view a commit and show both author and committer information:

See the section on specifying revisions 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.

Various views of a repository are presented. Each view is based on output from an external command, most often git log, git diff, or git show.

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 every 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.

Some of the commands used or provided by Tig can be configured. This goes for some of the environment variables as well as the external commands. These user-defined commands can use arguments that refer to the current browsing state by using one of the following variables.

Example user-defined commands:

Each view has a title window which shows the name of the view, current commit ID if available, and where the view is positioned:

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:

Upon startup, Tig first reads the system wide configuration file ({sysconfdir}/tigrc by default) and then proceeds to read the user’s configuration file (~/.tigrc by default). The paths to either of these files can be overridden through the following environment variables:

Commits that are referenced by tags and branch heads will be marked by the reference name surrounded by [ and ]:

If you want to limit what branches are shown, say only show branches named master or those which start with the feature/ prefix, you can do it by setting the following variable:

Or set the variable permanently in your environment.

It is possible to alter how diffs are shown by the diff view. If for example you prefer to have commit and author dates shown as relative dates, use:

Or set the variable permanently in your environment.

For more custom needs, external commands provide a way to easily execute a script or program. They are bound to keys and use information from the current browsing state, such as the current commit ID. Tig comes with the following built-in external commands:

If you are interested only in those revisions that made changes to a specific file (or even several files) list the files like this:

To avoid ambiguity with Tig’s subcommands or repository references such as tag names, be sure to separate file names from other Git options using "--". So if you have a file named status it will clash with the status subcommand, and thus you will have to use:

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 changes that happened between two dates you can use:

Alternatively, commits can be limited to a specific range, such as "all commits between tag-1.0 and tag-2.0". For example:

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:

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:

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.

Revision 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."

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: