VisGi: Visualizing Git branches

Abstract

Git repositories quickly become highly complex structures that do not reveal much human-readable information beyond files and folders of active branches. This paper introduces VisGi, a tool to abstract and visualize the branch structure of Git repositories, as well as their folder trees. By interpreting branches as groups of aggregated commits, their dependencies are condensed into a directed acyclic graph, and displayed using graph layout strategies. Additionally, Sunburst diagrams are used to display the current content of these branches, the differences between each two branches, as well as the evolution along any singular selected path through the repository. © 2013 IEEE.