Tig – Text-mode interface for Git

Tig is one of the most valuable hidden gems out there.

I use it both for simple things like a good looking commit log (the default view), but like especially how I can navigate into an old commit, hit t (for tree), and navigate and peek into the files available in that specific commit, hit b (for blame) to view which commit changed a particular row etc.

I like how all the different views play together into such useful workflows, and how, just like in vim, everything is available one mnemonic keystroke away. Hit h (for help) inside it to explore ... you will be surprised at the power of using these different views together in practice.

I’ve been using tig for years and never did a push / pull / checkout with it. The git CLI works fine for that, so I understand the authors priority here.

"Curses" is a library for writing, well, TUIs[0]. I get that's a bit circular, so let me explain.

With a normal CLI program, you essentially just output to STDOUT line by line. You type `git status`, and the git program basically does `print(status)`. Then you're back to your terminal and you type another command, git or otherwise.

A "curses" program renders fundamentally different. It's much more like how video games render. Every time it renders, it'll draw to the entire screen. You're not in an empty command line where you can type any command, rather you are "in" the application. Take a look at this screenshot [1]. You can imagine how pressing up/down keys might move which input is selected. If you want to get back to the normal terminal you have to quit the TUI application.

While not commonly thought of TUIs, generally vi/emacs/lynx/etc would all technically qualify (tho people might give you a strange look if you called them TUIs). To be clear, these do not use curses. They kind of predate curses and just wrote it manually. Curses is not a requirement ffor a TUI, but is by far the most common library to use when writing TUIs now-a-days.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/oD7mJ.png

I use tig every day! Love it!

My one wish is that when you go to edit a file from the interface (by hitting e) is that it would keep you in the directory you're in rather than editing the file as if you're in git root. Linters and other things break when I edit files from the root directory in our mono repo

+1 Tig is awesome!