A Visual Git Reference

The goal of this website is to be a concise, visual reference for how git
commands work. I often draw pictures like this on a whiteboard for my
colleagues, so I figured I would make a nice electronic version once and for
all.

Implementation

I chose to draw the images using TeX and
PGF/TikZ. I originally tried using
Graphviz, but unfortunately there is no way to
tell it how to lay out the graph exactly. Using TikZ, I was able to create
a domain-specific language to represent commit graphs, and I think the result
turned out quite well.

All of the common macros are stored in
common.tex.
Each image source includes this file. To see an example of how to use these
macros, look at
commit-master.tex.

To generate the image files, I first create PDFs using
pdflatex, and from there I create
SVGs and PNGs using
pdf2svg and
convert, respectively.

License

Copyright © 2010, Mark Lodato. Japanese
translation © 2010, Kazu Yamamoto.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License.