Me and my colleague Tomas are using Subversion for our company source code repository. At our clients we have been using CVS , Perforce and SourceSafe .

Lately we have been looking at the new popular scm tools. Tomas has been using Mercurial a while and I have been looking at git . I have also been trying it out against github too.

As always with any scm tool there can never be to many diff or viewing tools and today I happened to stumble across a neat little console tool for git, called tig . Named in the humorous unix fashion by reversion the name, tig is git backwards. I found it on the gitready blog tig, the ncurses front-end to Git

But, I’m using a Mac and would like to try it out. In the blog they mention MacPorts as a means to install it but that seems a little to much just to try this little thing. So I looked into just grabbing the code and compiling it straight from the source.

I pulled it down and tried to compile it as below

$ mkdir tig
$ cd tig
$ git init
$ git pull http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/tig.git
$ make 

But make fails. There is a Makefile in the package and a bunch of autoconf files. No prepared configure script though. The whole source code is only one single .c file, tig.c. make complains about some missing _iconv functions. So I added -liconv to the LDLIBS variable in the Makefile

LDLIBS ?= -lcurses -liconv

And that was all to get it running and I must say it’s pretty neat little thing. Have a look at the manual