Git tree visualizer: how to see your Git history as a graph

A Git tree visualizer draws your commit history as a graph: every dot is a commit, every coloured line is a branch, and two lines meeting at one dot is a merge. Git itself comes with two: run git log --graph --oneline --all --decorate in any terminal, or open gitk --all. When you want a history you can click, filter and search, use a GUI commit graph such as GitTree, a free Git client for macOS, Windows and Linux.

This guide walks through all three, then shows how to read lanes and merge commits and how to find one commit among thousands. A short disclosure: GitTree’s maker wrote it. The command-line and gitk sections need nothing but Git.

Git log graph: the tree view already built into Git

The quickest Git tree view is one command. It works in any repository, over SSH, and on every system Git runs on:

git log --graph --oneline --all --decorate

• --graph draws a text graph of branches and merges to the left of each commit. It also sorts commits so that no parent appears before its children.
• --oneline prints one line per commit: the short hash and the first line of the message.
• --all shows every branch, remote branch and tag plus HEAD, not just the branch you are on. Without it, branches that are not merged into your current branch stay hidden.
• --decorate prints branch and tag names next to the commits they point to. Git already does this when the output goes to a terminal, so the flag matters mostly when you pipe the output or have changed log.decorate.

The output looks like this. The newest commit is at the top, * marks a commit, and the |, \ and / characters are the branch lines:

*   a1b2c3d (HEAD -> main) Merge branch 'feature/search'
|\
| * 9f8e7d6 (feature/search) Highlight matched terms
| * 5c4b3a2 Add search index
* | 1a2b3c4 Fix typo in README
|/
* 0f9e8d7 (tag: v1.0.0) Release 1.0.0

Read it from the bottom up: v1.0.0 was released, then two lines of work ran side by side (a README fix on main, a search feature on its own branch), and the merge at the top joined them again.

Save it as a short alias

Nobody wants to type four flags every time. A Git alias turns the whole command into git tree:

git config --global alias.tree "log --graph --oneline --all --decorate"
git tree

Four variations worth knowing

git log --graph --oneline --first-parent main
git log --graph --oneline --all --simplify-by-decoration
git log --graph --oneline main..feature/search
git log --graph --pretty=format:"%h %an %ar %s"

1. --first-parent follows only the first parent of each merge, so main reads as a straight list of what landed on it, one merge per feature.
2. --simplify-by-decoration keeps only the commits a branch or tag points to: an outline of your Git branch tree without the commits in between.
3. main..feature/search shows the commits on feature/search that are not in main yet, which is what a merge would bring in.
4. --pretty=format adds the author and a relative date (“3 days ago”) to every line.

gitk: the Git history viewer that ships with Git

gitk is Git’s own graphical repository browser, written in Tcl/Tk. It draws the commit graph, shows the details of each commit and lists the files in each revision. Start it from inside a repository:

gitk --all

gitk accepts the same limits as git log, so you can narrow it to a time range or a folder. This opens only the last two weeks of changes under src/:

gitk --since="2 weeks ago" -- src/

If your shell answers gitk: command not found, your Git installation left it out. On Debian and Ubuntu, gitk is a separate package:

sudo apt install gitk

gitk is built for reading history. It has a few commit actions in its right-click menu, but making commits belongs to its sibling tool, git gui, which by its own documentation does not show project history. For everyday work you end up switching between the two windows and the terminal.

A GUI commit graph: a Git tree view you can click

A desktop Git client draws the same tree, but every row is live. Select a commit to see its message, parents and changed files. Right-click it to create a branch, cherry-pick or revert. Double-click a branch label to check it out, or drag one branch onto another to merge or rebase. In GitTree the commit graph is the main window rather than a separate viewer.

Here is what GitTree draws on the graph, beyond dots and lines:

• Colour-coded lanes for every branch, with local, remote and tag labels on the commits they point to.
• A // WIP row above the newest commit for changes you have not committed yet, and each stash drawn on the graph at the commit it was made from.
• Author avatars and signature badges on signed commits.
• Pull request and CI-check chips on branch tips once you connect GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Azure DevOps.
• Smooth scrolling past 100,000 commits (measured on Linux), so large histories stay usable.

GitTree runs the Git already installed on your computer (version 2.39 or newer), so every button does what the matching command would do. If you are still deciding between the two styles, our comparison of using a Git GUI versus the command line covers the trade-offs.

How to read a Git commit graph: lanes, forks and merges

Whether the graph is ASCII in a terminal or coloured in a window, the same rules apply:

Reading merge commits

A merge commit has two parents. The first parent is the branch you were on when you merged, usually main. The second is the branch you merged in. That is why --first-parent gives such a clean summary of main: it skips the inside of every feature branch. In GitTree, select a merge and the details panel lists both parent hashes.

When lanes cross and the picture gets busy

Long-lived branches that merge back and forth make lanes cross. Nothing is broken; there is simply more on screen than you need. Cut it down to the branches you care about. In the terminal, name them instead of using --all, for example git log --graph --oneline main feature/search. In GitTree, right-click a branch label and choose Hide in Graph, Solo in Graph to show only that branch, or Pin to the Left to keep its lane in the first column.

Search Git history: find one commit among thousands

Seeing the tree is half the job. The other half is finding the one commit that changed the thing you are debugging.

Search from the command line

git log --oneline --author="Jane"
git log --oneline --since="2 weeks ago" -- src/
git log --oneline -S"parse_header"
git log --oneline -G"fn [a-z_]+_header"

• --author keeps commits whose author name or email matches the pattern.
• --since and --until limit by date, and -- src/ keeps only commits that touched that path.
• -S, the “pickaxe”, finds commits that added or removed a string. It is the fastest way to learn when a function appeared or disappeared.
• -G finds commits whose added or removed lines match a regular expression. Stick to POSIX bracket expressions such as [a-z_] or [[:alnum:]]: shortcuts like \w do not work with every Git build.

Search in GitTree with author:, file: and change:

The search above the graph (Search Loaded History) matches a message, author, hash, branch or tag. For a deeper search, open the command palette with Ctrl+Shift+P (⌘+Shift+P on a Mac), type #, then your query. Words without a prefix search commit messages, and these prefixes narrow the result:

• author:jane or author:"Jane Doe": the author’s name or email contains that text.
• file:src/main.rs: the commit touches that path. Repeat it to match several paths.
• change:parse_header: the commit adds or removes that string, like git log -S.
• change:/fn [a-z_]+_header/: a changed line matches the regular expression, like git log -G.

Combine them in one query: #fix crash author:jane file:src/ finds Jane’s commits that mention “fix crash” and touch src/. To shrink the graph itself rather than list results, use Filter Graph… to keep only one author, a date range or a path.

Which Git tree visualizer should you use?

Most developers end up using more than one: the terminal for a quick look, a GUI for digging through history and for edits that are easier to see, like an interactive rebase in a GUI. If you are new to branches and commits, start with our Git for beginners guide. If you want to compare desktop apps, see our round-up of the best Git GUI clients.

GitTree is free today, private repositories included. See everything the commit graph and the rest of the app can do, or read the install notes for Mac, Windows and Linux.