Lignum

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:24:56 +1200

A source code repository visualiser with a 1,000’ view.

I wasn’t satisfied with the state of Git repository visualisers. I found they love to show you every last commit. When your repo is more than trivial, this is not useful for getting the big-picture.

Mine is different: it focusses on the macroscopic structure. Which are the active branches, where are the tags, where are the divergence and merge points?

In my first software job out of college – back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and CVS was the height of version control – we often ended up drawing what we termed railway diagrams on the whiteboard to visualise the structure. This is my attempt to automate creating these.

Features

Output in GraphViz dot format
Revision of interest filtering, with wildcards
Options to include all local branches (default), remotes, tags and root (parentless) commits
Edges are annotated with their size in commits (broadly the number on the direct line from A to B, though merge commits give different results)

Getting started

This is a Rust command-line application.

cargo install --locked lignum, or get it from the source repository.

Run lignum in a directory that contains a git repository, or give it --repo <path>. If you have xdot installed, the -x option will pipe the output directly to xdot.

Check the --help message for more.

Git on Ross Younger

Lignum

Features

Getting started