Starting an interactive rebase from Tig

written on Friday, September 16, 2016

One of the tools I use a lot to work with git repositories is Tig. This handy ncurses tool let you browse your history, cherry-pick commits, do partial commits and a few other things. But one thing I wanted to do was to be able to start an interactive rebase from within Tig. This week I decided to dig into the documentation a bit to see if it was possible to do so.

Reading the manual I found out Tig is extensible: one can bind shortcut keys to trigger commands. The bound commands can use of several state variables such as the current commit or the current branch. This makes it possible to use Tig as a commit selector for custom commands. Armed with this knowledge, I added these lines to $HOME/.tigrc:

bind main R !git rebase -i %(commit)^
bind diff R !git rebase -i %(commit)^

That worked! If you add these two lines to your .tigrc file, you can start Tig, scroll to the commit you want and press Shift+R to start the rebase from it. No more copying the commit id and going back to the command line!

Note: Shift+R is already bound to the refresh action in Tig, but this action can also be triggered with F5, so it's not really a problem.