You might be interested in:
https://github.com/cantino/mcfly - fuzzy shell history (feels lighter than atuin to me, in rust)
https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec - rerun on file change, knows about .gitignore/.ignore etc (in rust)
https://github.com/jonas/tig - instead of lazygit, mostly for easier git log viewing for me as I use straight git most of the time
Otherwise a lot of crossover in what I use too.
In Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?jonas
tig
C2013–2026
jonas / tig
tig
Text-mode interface for git
44Distinct people
47Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
13.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Text-mode interface for git
GitHub
Where it is used
The source check is incomplete. Verified examples will appear here.
What people are saying
For people interested in magit-like features, but don’t use Emacs, I highly recommend tig (https://github.com/jonas/tig). Here’s a tweet with a quick video with me using it…
robenkleene used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- fredriknoren/ungit · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- ggreer/the_silver_searcher · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- tpope/vim-fugitive · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year47 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-06-07 09:08:15 UTC to 2026-04-02 11:34:14 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Tig: text-mode interface for Git
What is Tig?
Tig is an ncurses-based text-mode interface for git. It functions mainly
as a Git repository browser, but can also assist in staging changes for
commit at chunk level and act as a pager for output from various Git
commands.
Resources
Homepage: https://github.com/jonas/tig
Manual: https://www.mankier.com/7/tigmanual
Tarballs: https://github.com/jonas/tig/releases
Q&A: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tig
Bugs and Feature Requests
Bugs and feature requests can be reported using the
issue tracker or by mail to the
Git mailing list. Ensure that the word
"tig" is in the subject. For other Tig related questions please use
Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tig.
If you are sending a bug report, please include the following information:
What Tig and ncurses versions are you using?
(tig -v)
What system do you have?
(uname -a, lsb_release -a)
What Git version are you using?
(git -v)
Installation and News
Information on how to build and install Tig are found in
the installation instructions.
News about releases and latest features and bug fixes are found in
the release notes.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
47 sourcesIf a TUI is an option, then `tig blame` is a good interface.
https://github.com/jonas/tig
In "GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Softwarehttps://github.com/jonas/tig is one of the first things I install on a new dev machine. It's a really nice UI for staging files or hunks. Since it's just a companion to the git CLI, it feels much more focused than full-blown git GUIs, and doesn't do anything magical.
In Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?I'd like to plug [tig](https://github.com/jonas/tig) for those who don't use emacs. I see lazygit recommended here too, but I've been using tig for years now and love it's simplicity.
In MagitI think https://github.com/jonas/tig and several other such tools are kind-of like that.
In Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)Very early on in my vim journey, I used to use fugitive[1], which is sort of a lighter equivalent of magit for vim. However, I found that too overkill and unwieldy. I never really found any benefits to forcing myself to stay inside vim to run some git command.
These days, I just use git in a tmux split rather than trying to force vim to show some arbitrary git UI. For a nice interactive git UI, I use tig[1]. Tig is essentially like fugitive/magic insofar as it allows me to interactively view a nice graphical log, stage/commit, traverse a file's historical blame, etc. It's a nicer UI compared to something like `gitk`.
I have these mappings in my `~/.vim/vimrc` for git/tig functionalities:
nnoremap gb :<C-u>echo system('git rev-parse --abbrev-ref @ <bar> tr -d "\n"')<CR>
nnoremap gB :<C-u>silent !tig blame <C-r>=shellescape(expand("
Read the rest
%"))<CR> +<C-r>=expand(line('.'))<CR><CR>:silent redraw!<CR>
nnoremap gO :<C-u>silent !tig<CR>:silent redraw!<CR>
[1]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive
[2]: https://github.com/jonas/tig
As with many things, the solution is complex because the problem is complex. Managing code history in a distributed manner, handling conflicts and allowing cooperative coding is not an easy problem to fix.
Having said this, Git doesn't make it easy by the terminology and concepts that are used. And also the inconcise UI (you use git reset for a lot of very different actions, some harmless, some very destructive) doesn't make it easy for a newcomer. Who will often resort to just remember oneliners or look them up from a manual without knowing what they actually do.
What really helped me in understanding Git was to understand the mechanics of the database on an abstract level. Commits and how branches/tags relate to them. If you understand that commits (not branches) are the tree and the branches just post-it's you put on the commits and ca
Read the rest
n rearrange as you please everything becomes much more malleable. Once you discover commits are hardly ever deleted/lost, but just the post-it's are moved (which makes the commits invisible), things become easily recoverable and fixable. Also not using code, but cats[1] also seems to greatly reduced the complexity of learning Git for me. Visual tools like Ungit[2], Tig[3], or plain Git log[4] help to see the commit tree and attached branches and gives an idea of how the data is manipulated.
There is also the Gitless[0] project which tries to redefine the UI of Git, without changing the data format itself. It offers a different look at the same repository and more clear and dedicated commands/concept to perform certain tasks. And since it just uses Git itself underneath you can seamlessly switch between it and Git without issues.
[0] https://gitless.com/
[1] https://girliemac.com/blog/2017/12/26/git-purr/
[2] https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit
[3] https://github.com/jonas/tig
[4] git log --oneline --decorate -50 --all --graph --remotes
For people interested in magit-like features, but don’t use Emacs, I highly recommend tig (https://github.com/jonas/tig).
Here’s a tweet with a quick video with me using it (https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1299415895262081024).
It works particularly well with Vim (I prefer it to fugitive, mainly because it’s more accessible directly from the command line, so it makes a nice complement to CLI git).
In Magit – A Git Porcelain inside EmacsFor me, personally, tig is the sweet spot. It shows me the output of "git status", I can select the files I want, and then commit them.
There is also lazygit, it's kind of similar, but different.
https://github.com/jonas/tig
In Git commit accepts several message flags (-m) to allow multiline commitsTig: Text Mode Interface for Git
1 points · Open discussionI'm really surprised that nobody mentions tig [0] when talking about git. It is by far the most convenient git visualizer I've ever used, and I use it hundreds of times a day. It's written in C so it's super fast (loads a huge project in a few seconds), and it's a CLI so you don't even have to leave the terminal.
[0] https://github.com/jonas/tig
In Learning Git from Novice to Expert# ci = clipboard in, co = clipboard out
# xclip so this works in gui apps too
alias ci="xclip -selection clipboard"
alias co="xclip -selection clipboard -o"
Also: tig, Text-mode interface for git https://github.com/jonas/tig
In Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?Check out https://github.com/jonas/tig, a ncurses-based text-mode interface for Git.
In CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Linetig is also fantastic for doing this.
- u for hunks
- 1 for individual lines
https://github.com/jonas/tig
In A walk through the Magit interfaceYes! If you're comfortable with a terminal but would rather have a TUI than an CLI, I
recommend `tig`[0] or `lazygit`[1]. If you want to launch a separate GUI program in its
own window to use git, git-cola[2] isn't too bad. It looks much better than the
screenshots make it out to be if you have a good Qt 5 theme (e.g., breeze-dark).
I personally prefer separate wrappers for different git commands for two reasons:
1. I like how the modular nature of git encourages me to think.
2. I'd rather not leave my shell just to use git.
For that reason, I use `forgit`[3] as a git client on {ba,z}sh. I cannot recommend
`forgit` highly enough if you like fuzzy-finders like FZF[4]; my productivity has never
been higher. It's the perfect blend of the modularity and composability offered by UNIX
philosophy and the benefits of a simple user inte
Read the rest
rface.
As a plus, `forgit` integrates well with `diff-so-fancy`[5] (amazing-looking diffs),
`bat`, and `emoji-cli`.
[0]: https://github.com/jonas/tig
[1]: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
[2]: https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola
[3]: https://github.com/wfxr/forgit
[4]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
[5]: https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy
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