Is there any way to exclude branches from showing in GitK?

Question

Sometimes when I use GitK there's a load of commits on branches I'm not concerned with and they tend get in the way of what I'm doing.

It would be nice to be able to specify which branches I want, or specify which branches I want to exclude.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can specify which branches you want by specifying them as arguments to the gitk command. I'm assuming that you're already using --all, but you might be interested to know that there's also a --not flag...although it has some side effects and is not too useful in most circumstances.

Consider a repository that looks like this:

git checkout feature-B
gitk --all

If you specify no arguments, you get just the branch you're on:

gitk

If you specify multiple branches, you get those branches, and the branches that are fully merged (i.e. they don't "stick out"). For example, here I have feature-B, feature-C, along with the fully merged feature-A and master, but no feature-D:

gitk feature-B feature-C

Finally, you can use the --not flag to ignore a branch. However, since a branch refers to all the commits that lead up to it, the --not flag will ignore commits that are on the branches that you do specify.

gitk feature-B --not feature-D
gitk --all --not feature-D feature-C

Both of these will give you:

Here, the commits Initial commit and 1 are ignored, because they belonged to branch feature-D. Commit 2 is also ignored for the same reason, but is shown as an empty commit, since it would be incorrect and misleading to show commit 3 as the initial commit in the branch. This flag can be helpful sometimes, but I don't usually find myself using it.