GitViz

Psst, hey... are you looking for a .NET Core 3 version? Check out the netcore branch. Contributions and PRs on that branch are very welcome!

Type commands. See their effect in real time. Perfect rendering for presentations.

Among the many things we do at Readify to help people build better software, we teach people about Git.

For newbies, the concept of commit graphs, references, branches and merges can be a bit hard to visualize.

Instead of trying to do all this on slides, or in sync on a whiteboard, we wanted to be able to run real commands and see a presentation quality diagram in real-time. This tool does that.

We also intelligently render unreachable commits to help people understand hard resets and rebases.

Where do I get it?

Pre-built binaries are available at https://github.com/Readify/GitViz/releases

Release Quality

Alpha. This entire project so far consists of one Readify guy sitting down the back of a training course and tapping away for a few hours, no more.

What is 'presentation quality'?

Large. Clear. Projector-optimized and tested colors. Just enough information to be useful.

What this tool does NOT do

This is not a day-to-day visualizing tool for big, active repositories. It's optimised for repositories with less than 20 commits, for very specific training scenarios in live presentations.

How it works

Shells out to git.exe, and then renders it with the excellent GraphSharp.

FAQ

How can I remove dangling commits?

GitViz shows dangling commits to make it easier to visualise rebases and other history rewrites. To remove those commits to clean things up run (this will delete all unreachable objects in the repo, be careful):

git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now --all
git gc --prune=now