Showing branch hierarchy at the command line?

Question

I'm curious if there is a way to show branch hierarchy on the command line? For instance if I use git branch, instead of seeing output like this:

* master joes_work refactoring experiment 

You see output like this:

* master     joes_work     refactoring         experiment 

That way it's easy to see which branch a particular branch.. branched off of. Even if there's no specific command that outputs a tree structure, is there a command that outputs information on which branch came from which branch? I can use a perl script to format the output.

Answer 1

sehe's solution looks great, here is another one that seems to contain similar information, formatted differently, it uses git log, so it contains commit information as well (ignore the branch names, I kind of messed them up!):

git log --all --graph --decorate --oneline --simplify-by-decoration  * ae038ad (HEAD, branch2-1) add content to tmp1 | * f5a0029 (branch2-1-1) Add another |/   * 3e56666 (branch1) Second wave of commits | * 6c9af2a (branch1-2) add thing |/   * bfcf30a (master) commit 1 

Answer 2

Try

git show-branch git show-branch --all 

Example output:

bash$ git show-branch --all ! [branchA] commitA only in branchA  * [branchB] commitB   ! [branchC] commitC only in branchC --------------------- +   [branchA] commitA only in branchA   *  [branchB] commitB   + [branchC] commitC only in branchC  *+ [branchC~1] commitB-1 also in branchC  *+ [branchC~2] commitB-2 also in branchC +++ [branchC~3] common ancestor +++ [branchC~4] more common ancestors