Download a tarball from http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/releases or clone the Tig repository git://github.com/jonas/tig.git.

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.

Installation using configure

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.

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

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_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).

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:

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:

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.