Merged and unmerged

The Unmerged and Merged tabs of the branches pane list the branches that are not yet merged into the project’s primary branch, and the ones that are, each with its tip’s subject, author and date. They work like the git branch -r --no-merged origin/main and --merged aliases many people keep around, but you can act on each row, and the graph shows only the selected branch: where it branched off, its own commits, and where it was merged back in.

What the tabs list

Press ] on the branches pane to get from Branches past Tags to Unmerged, then Merged. Each row shows:

  feature/login     Add the login form          Ada Lovelace   3h
  fix/null-config   Handle a missing config     Grace Hopper   2d

the branch name, its tip commit’s subject, the author (through .mailmap, so one person is one name) and the commit date. Both tabs are sorted by commit date, newest first.

• Merged means reachable: a branch is merged when its tip is the base branch or one of the base’s ancestors.
• Unmerged is everything else. A branch that was squash-merged or rebase-merged has a tip that isn’t in the base’s history, so it stays on Unmerged.

Some branches are never listed:

• The base branch itself.
• Long-lived branches, named exactly one of safe_branches (by default master, main, production and prod) on any remote. They’d be noise on both tabs, and you never want to delete one by accident.
• Archived branches on Unmerged: names containing anything in unmerged_exclude (default archive), the way people add grep -v archive to the alias.

Both lists are set in the configuration file.

Like with like

If the base is a remote branch (origin/main), only branches on that remote are compared. If it’s a local branch, only local branches are. That keeps one row per branch and compares like with like.

The base branch

The tabs compare against the base branch, shown in the pane’s title: Unmerged 4 (origin/main). tt-git detects it as the project’s primary branch:

1. whatever a remote’s HEAD points at, origin first,
2. else the first of main, master, development, develop or trunk found on a remote,
3. else the same names locally.

To compare against something else, press b. The Base branch picker lists Detect automatically first (with what detection would pick), then every remote branch, then every local one, with the current choice marked. Type to narrow the list and press enter.

tt-git saves your choice as tt-git.baseBranch in the repository’s own git config, so each project remembers its own and nothing goes in your global config. Pick Detect automatically to go back. If the saved branch is later deleted, detection takes over again.

The Tags tab measures how far each recent tag is from the same base branch.

Note

In a repository with several worktrees, the base branch is shared: it’s stored in the one .git/config they all use.

A branch’s history in the graph

On Unmerged and Merged, the graph shows only the selected branch, so you can see what it contains without the rest of the history in the way. The graph’s title changes from Graph [all] to the branch’s name.

From the bottom up, you see:

1. Where it branched off: the base commit it started from, marked (branched off origin/main).

2. The branch’s own commits. Only its first-parent history, so commits it pulled in from other branches (say, a merge of main into it) are left out and you see only the work done on it.

3. Where it was merged back in: the base commit that merged it, marked (merged into origin/main). For an unmerged branch, the base’s current tip takes this place, so you can see how far the base has moved on since the branch started.

The base’s commits in between are left out. A branch that was fast-forwarded into the base has no commits of its own left, so only its tip is shown.

Moving the selection redraws the graph for the next branch. Going back to the Branches tab, or pressing a in the graph, shows the full graph again. Any author or file filter on the graph is set aside while these tabs are open and comes back when you leave them.

How tt-git works this out with git is covered in How tt-git uses git.

Cleaning up merged branches

The Merged tab is a list of branches that are safe to delete: everything on them is already in the base.

1. f to fetch and prune, so the list is current.
2. ] to the Merged tab.
3. Check a branch’s history in the graph if you want to be sure.
4. d to delete it. A branch you have locally is deleted locally (git branch -d); a branch that’s only on the remote is deleted there (git push <remote> --delete <branch>), after the dialog shows you the command.

The other branch keys work on these tabs too: check out, new branch, rename, merge, rebase and copy. See Branches.

Keys

Key	Does
] [	Next / previous tab
b	Pick the base branch (Detect automatically clears your choice)
enter space	Check out the branch
d	Delete it (locally if you have it, else on the remote; asks first)
n	New branch from it
M / r	Merge it into the current branch / rebase the current branch onto it
/	Filter as you type
f	git fetch --all --prune
c	Copy the branch name