Using git log to visually format or graph all branches

Git lets you see the commit messages in several ways using the git log command but sometimes that is not enough.

To see a simple one line listing with the last few digits of the commit hash, use

git log --oneline

To see an tree of the branches made using ascii, use

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

If you are on a mac/windows, one of the eas­i­est ways to visu­al­ize the trees is using the extremely rich built in visual tool — gitk.

gitk --all