Download a tarball from https://github.com/jonas/tig/releases or clone the Tig repository git://github.com/jonas/tig.git.
Note: Do not use the tar.gz file for version 2.0 because it will fail to compile due to issue #283 and #337
The quick and simple way to install Tig is:
$ make $ make install
By default, tig is installed in $HOME/bin. To install tig elsewhere set
prefix to the desired path:
$ make prefix=/usr/local $ sudo make install prefix=/usr/local
Documentation files, such as manpages, are distributed in the release tarballs, and can be installed using:
$ make install-doc
When installing directly from the Tig repository, make install-doc will assume
that the documentation tool chain is available and build the documentation
locally. In case you do not wish to install the required tools, documentation
can be installed from the release branch using:
$ make install-release-doc
Before upgrading, you are advised to read the release notes.
Optionally, you can use the configure script to detect dependencies:
$ ./configure $ make $ make install
If your iconv library is not in the default library and include path, you need
to pass the --with-libiconv option to configure to tell it where to look.
If you have installed ncurses with brew, run configure with the following
flags to have it properly detected (note this done out of the box if you
build without configure):
$ ./configure LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/opt/ncurses/lib CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/opt/ncurses/include
Note, if you are building from the Tig repository, you need to generate
configure yourself. First, ensure that autoconf is installed on your system,
and then run the following command:
$ make configure
You can use Homebrew to install Tig on OS X:
$ brew install tig
Note, for older installations of Tig, Homebrew does not automatically
update the system-wide tigrc file when upgrading Tig and the
behavior
was changed in 2015 to install the system-wide tigrc in the
/usr/local/share/tig/examples directory so Tig always uses the
defaults compiled into the binary.
If you see warnings when starting Tig after upgrading, e.g.:
tig warning: Errors while loading /usr/local/etc/tigrc
It means you either need to manually update /usr/local/etc/tigrc with
changes from /usr/local/share/tig/examples rename the file if you
never made any changes to it.
$ mv /usr/local/etc/tigrc{,.old}
Installation using Nix
You can use link:https://nixos.org/nix/[Nix] to install Tig on NixOS, or any Linux/OSX distirbution with Nix installed:
$ nix-env -i tig
Installation on Windows
-----------------------
To run on Windows, you will need link:https://www.cygwin.com/[cygwin].
You must then install the packages `git`, `gcc-core`, `make`, `libiconv-devel`
and `libncurses-devel`. Extract the tarball and install by using `configure`
as explained above.
If you want to install from the sources, then you will also need the `automake`
package (which will also install `autoconf`). Then run `make configure` and install
by using `configure` as explained above.
Build configuration
-------------------
Build settings are read from the file `config.make` and for certain systems also
from `contrib/config.make-$kernel`. An example of the latter is Mac OS X, where
`contrib/config.make-Darwin` provides out-of-the-box configuration for using the
system ncurses library and linking with the iconv library. This makes it easy to
configure the build without having to use the `configure` script. As a side
note, `configure` itself generates a `config.make` file.
Apart from the different standard `make` build variables (`CC`, `CFLAGS`, etc.)
and standard `configure` variables (`prefix`, `bindir`, etc.), build settings
can be one of the following flags:
- `NO_SETENV`: Define this variable to enable work-around for missing
`setenv()`.
- `NO_MKSTEMPS`: Define this variable to enable work-around for missing
`mkstemps()`.
- `NO_WORDEXP`: Define this variable to enable work-around for missing
`wordexp()`.
- `NO_BUILTIN_TIGRC`: Reduce the size of the binary by not including a
built-in tigrc. The built-in tigrc is used as a fallback when no
`tigrc` is found in the system configuration directory (e.g. `/etc`).
- `TIG_USER_CONFIG`: Allow to customize the `tigrc` path (default `~/.tigrc`).
The following example `config.make` manually configures Tig to use the ncurses
library with wide character support and include the proper ncurses header file
(see tig.h for more information):
LDLIBS = -lncursesw
CPPFLAGS = -DHAVE_NCURSESW_CURSES_H
For more examples of build settings, see `contrib/config.make` and
`config.make.in`.
Tools and packages
------------------
The following tools and packages are needed:
[cols="2<,8<",options="header"]
|=============================================================================
|Tool |Description
|git-core |Tig is just a frontend for Git.
|ncurses or ncursesw |Be sure to have the development files
installed. Usually they are available in a
separate package ending with `-dev`.
Ncurses with wide character support (ncursesw)
is required to properly handle UTF-8 encoded
strings.
Note for packagers: For Tig's `configure`
script to work as expected you should avoid
configuring and building ncurses using
`--with-shared`.
|iconv |If iconv is not provided by the c library
you need to change the Makefile to link it
into the binary.
|=============================================================================
The following tools and packages are optional and mainly needed for creating the
configure script and building documentation:
[cols="2<,8<",options="header"]
|=============================================================================
|Tool |Description
|readline |Adds support for completion and history in
search and command prompts.
|autoconf |Contains autoreconf for generating configure
from configure.ac.
|asciidoc (>= 8.4) |Generates HTML and (DocBook) XML from text.
|xmlto |Generates manpages and chunked HTML from XML.
|DocBook XSL (>= 1.72.0) |Used by xmlto for building manpages.
|DocBook (DSSL/Jade) tools |Generates PDF from XML.
Also known as docbook-utils.
|=============================================================================