Relationship between n git branches

Question

If I have n git branches, how do I easily show the relationship between these branches?

Basically I am interested in seeing a tree of a subset of all the branches in my repository. I am however not interested in all the intermediate commits.

E.g.: My repository looks like this:

     o---o--o A     /      / o--o--o--o--o--o B  \  \        \   \  o--o C   \    \     \     \     o--o--o--o--o--o D 

But probably way more complicated. Now I want to see the relationship between branch A, C and D. Something along the lines of:

     o A     / o--o--o    \   \     o---o C          \           o--o D 

Or an equivalent overview. Is this possible, and how? (A graphical tool will be just fine.)

Solution

Based on Antoine Pelisses answer, the below line seems to do (almost) exactly what I want:

git log --graph --decorate --oneline --simplify-by-decoration A B C 

Update

Mark Longair points out in his answer below that gitk accepts the same parameters as git rev-list, so it is possible to do:

gitk --simplify-by-decoration A C D 

Answer 1

You can give this a try:

git log --graph --all --decorate --simplify-by-decoration 

It will only show commits that are branch heads or tagged.

Answer 2

I would use:

gitk A C D 

... there are probably other git GUIs that produce a prettier rendering of the commit graph, but I've always found gitk fine for this purpose. All the branches and tags are labelled in the "London Underground"-style representation:

_{(source: mark at mythic-beasts.com)}

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You can also use the --simplify-by-decoration option to gitk, since it understands all of the parameters that git rev-list does, for example:

gitk --simplify-by-decoration A C D