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Comment by akamoonknight | Hacker News Reader

I will agree that visually seeing the tree is such a useful tool to have access to. I know that's not the true desire of your use case, but in case it's useful, I will add what is obviously the best git alias, 'git lg': https://coderwall.com/p/euwpig/a-better-git-log

git lg --all is probably my most used command in terminals and I think it gives me a better view of how projects are flowing on the whole.

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If I need to visualize the network of commits I use this alias in .gitconfig:

network = log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate --format=format:'%C(bold blue)%h%C(reset) - %C(bold cyan)%aD%C(reset) %C(bold green)(%ar)%C(reset)%C(bold yellow)%d%C(reset)%n'' %C(white)%s%C(reset) %C(dim white)- %an%C(reset)' --all

I'd rather use a "visual tool" to visualize

No apparently that means you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’ll corrupt the repo, and you’re not a real software developer so we’ll come to your desk and rip up your I’m A Very Serious Professional card.

It's funny, because most devs that are pro CLI for these kind of things, are actually unable to operate vi, or install any server / container without installing a complete desktop environment.

Let's all go back to the ed line editor

And that's totally valid. gitk is my main experience with visual git tools and using it gives a ton of information that is not only visually nice to look at, but also pretty easy to navigate. But gitk isn't always the most available and sometimes I just need a quick look at the history. They're all just tools in the toolbox, but even knowing the tool exists is a first step.

and the ultimate option for git lg is --reflog. Seeing all branches, even the old ones that do not exist anymore is a eye opening event in discovering the true nature of git: it never changes a commit, ever.

While reflog is amazing, the "ever" in your statement is not true, `git gc` will prune your reflog: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc

Most of the time this doesn't matter in practice but you should be aware that unreachable refs don't stay around forever.

I exclusively use git via the cli because guis are too confusing for me to keep track of what is going on, I also like to use tig to browse the commit history like above.

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