Display gitk log in reverse order

Question

Is there any way to reverse the order of the visual commit log view that displays in gitk?

I'm talking about visual representation that renders in gitk in color as a tree view; i.e., the GUI version of what you get when you run something like this in the terminal:

git log --graph --online --abbrev-commit

I've looked in the menu under Edit Preferences and View New view..., but I couldn't find anything that pertained to the ordering of the commits.

I know I can display the commit log in reverse order in the terminal by adding the --reverse flag:

git log --reverse --oneline --abbrev-commit
# Displays list correctly

But it doesn't seem to play nicely with the --graph flag:

git log --reverse --oneline --abbrev-commit --graph
# fatal: cannot combine --reverse with --graph

Perhaps this is why gitk doesn't give us the option to render the view in reverse.

At any rate, I'd like to know: is possible in gitk to reverse the order of the commit log view?

I know this is not exactly what you wanted, but you can look into [`git-forest`](http://stackoverflow.com/a/15562953/380757), a script that will let you display the graph on the console, even when used with `--reverse` option. It parses the output from `git-log` and hence all options supported with `git-log` can be passed to this script as well. — Tuxdude, Mar 22 '13 at 22:07
I don't know the answer to this question, but darn that is some fine markup +1 — Hogan, Mar 23 '13 at 03:18

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

gitk mostly accepts the same arguments as git rev-list (git: Is there a command line option for "Sort by date" for gitk?). However the --reverse argument, which would show the commits in descending order, is specifically excluded:

"--objects" - "--objects-edge" - "--reverse"
    # These cause our parsing of git log's output to fail, or else
    # they're options we want to set ourselves, so ignore them.

(Added in ee66e089c.)

Commenting it out and running with gitk --reverse seems to work, but I'm not sure if that would be accepted upstream as a patch.

Display gitk log in reverse order

1 Answers1