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.

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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.