Can I affect the order/column of branches displayed in gitk and Eclipse Egit

Question

When doing gitk --all I get a nice summary of commits/branches/tags across a whole repo.

However, the way the branches are displayed is not always consistent, and it is also different to the method Egit uses in Eclipse's History pane.

Is there a way to control the ordering of the columns for either/both of gitk and egit?

Specifically, I would like to always have commits to master in the first (left-most) column.

(If possible, I'd like a 180 rotation of the nvie model's diagram, but simply having a consistent order with master on the left would be good enough.)

I read that gitk accepts most of the git-log parameters, so I've checked its man page but couldn't figure out what (if any) of the options do this. (And if that is the right route, how would I get egit to use those options?)

Replacement

For gitk, see https://mcmap.net/q/1232881/-gitk-weird-history-tree – Plop

Answer 1

The git does not store "branchname" as metadata within the commits so it really does not know about branch of any old commit. If you start with --all I'm afraid there's no support for getting different branches to any given order in the UI. However, in theory it could be done at least for the part that given branches were rendered in specified columns in the rendered display. The current behavior seems to be to always start with the most recent commit first and put that in the top left location of the display. If you selected all branches, it will be any branch that happens to end up there.

Namedropper