# gitk highlighting descendents/ancestors

2 messages from 2006-05-29 to 2006-05-29. Participants: Paul Mackerras, Matthias Kestenholz.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/4340

## Paul Mackerras, 2006-05-29 12:35

Subject: gitk highlighting descendents/ancestors
Message-ID: <17530.60026.636981.60532@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/17530.60026.636981.60532%40cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com

```
I have implemented a feature in gitk (on the "new" branch) where it
can highlight the commits that are, or are not, descendents or
ancestors of the selected commit.  For now it is invoked via a
drop-down menu.  Does this look useful to people?

At the moment, if you select "Not descendent" then the selected
commit and all the commits below it will be highlighted (since they
can't be descendents of the selected commit).  Similarly if you select
"Not ancestor" then the selected commit and all commits above it are
highlighted.  That's technically correct but doesn't seem very useful;
maybe I should suppress those highlights.

Also, whatever matches the string put in the "Find" field will be
highlighted.  I have taken out the "Files" and "Pickaxe" options in
the Find function, and put the pickaxe function into a new drop-down
menu for the highlighting function.  I have code ready to go for
shift-up and shift-down to move to the previous/next highlighted row,
once Junio applies my tiny patch to builtin-diff-tree.c.

Paul.

```

## Matthias Kestenholz, 2006-05-29 12:55

Subject: Re: gitk highlighting descendents/ancestors
Message-ID: <20060529125537.GD4916@spinlock.ch>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/20060529125537.GD4916%40spinlock.ch
In-Reply-To: <17530.60026.636981.60532@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>

```
Hi,

* Paul Mackerras (paulus@samba.org) wrote:
> I have implemented a feature in gitk (on the "new" branch) where it
> can highlight the commits that are, or are not, descendents or
> ancestors of the selected commit.  For now it is invoked via a
> drop-down menu.  Does this look useful to people?
> 

Yes, this is very useful for me. I have a complicated history graph
because I manage the codebase for several websites with one git
repository. It gets very hard to follow the colored lines in gitk
when there are many merges of feature branches.

The most useful feature for me is probably the "ancestor" view; "not
ancestor" could also be interesting if I wanted to visualize which
feature branches were already merged and which are not.

Thanks,
Matthias

```