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