Any way to control the default view of gitk

Question

I use gitk from Git for Windows. By default it seems to open with a view that only displays the currently checked out branch.

I have a different saved view which is the one that I use 90% of the time.

I normally open gitk from the cmd line (by running gitk &), and then have to change the view.

Is there any way to configure gitk to use my preferred view by default?

Answer 1

There does not appear to be a feature for this in gitk, however it is pretty easy to manually patch gitk to switch to the first permanent view (located for me in c:\Program Files\Git\mingw64\bin\gitk):

if {[info exists permviews]} {
    foreach v $permviews {
    set n $nextviewnum
    incr nextviewnum
    set viewname($n) [lindex $v 0]
    set viewfiles($n) [lindex $v 1]
    set viewargs($n) [lindex $v 2]
    set viewargscmd($n) [lindex $v 3]
    set viewperm($n) 1
    set viewchanged($n) 0
    addviewmenu $n
    }
    # add these two lines
    set curview [expr {$curview + 1}]
    set selectedview $curview
}

This will always select the first permanent view you defined as the default view. If you want to reorder the views, the (hidden) config file is at %USERPROFILE%\.config\git\gitk. The setting is called permviews.

Answer 2

Thanks, @mrexodia. One improvement I was able to make on your answer was to guard the additional lines so that they won't run if cmd-line args were provided:

if {$curview==0} {
    set curview 1 
    set selectedview $curview
}

Also, thanks to this thread for helping me understand that I had to run Git Bash as Administrator to be able to modify the gitk file.