# Installation instructions

2025-09-16

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

The latest version is: tig-2.6.0 (sha256)

Note: Do not use the tar.gz file for version 2.0 because it will fail to compile due to issue #283 and #337

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

Additional build options can be defined in the `config.make` file, which is loaded automatically when running `make` if it exists. By default, `contrib/config.make-$kernel_name` is loaded if it exists (currently available for Linux, macOS [`Darwin`] and Cygwin but Linux users should prefer the `configure` script). See `contrib/config.make` for example build options.

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`

If you prefer an autotools-based installation process, you can use the `configure` script to detect dependencies and enable features. If you downloaded the Tig sources from a release tarball there’s already a `configure` script. However, if you are building from the Tig repository, you need to ensure that `autoconf` is installed on your system and generate the `configure` script yourself.

To install using `configure`, run the following commands:

    $ make configure # Only run if you are building from the Git repository
    $ ./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.

If you have installed ncurses with brew, run configure with the following flags to have it properly detected (note this done out of the box if you build without `configure`):

    $ ./configure LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/opt/ncurses/lib CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/opt/ncurses/include

## Installation using Homebrew

You can use Homebrew to install Tig on macOS and Linux:

    $ brew install tig

Note, for older installations of Tig, Homebrew does not automatically update the system-wide `tigrc` file when upgrading Tig and the behavior was changed in 2015 to install the system-wide `tigrc` in the `/usr/local/share/tig/examples` directory so Tig always uses the defaults compiled into the binary.

If you see warnings when starting Tig after upgrading, e.g.:

    tig warning: Errors while loading /usr/local/etc/tigrc

It means you either need to manually update `/usr/local/etc/tigrc` with changes from `/usr/local/share/tig/examples` rename the file if you never made any changes to it.

    $ mv /usr/local/etc/tigrc{,.old}

## Installation using Nix

You can use Nix to install Tig on NixOS, or any Linux/macOS distribution with Nix installed:

    $ nix-env -i tig

## Installation on Linux

Depending on your distribution, you may be able to use one of the following commands to install Tig on Linux:

    $ apt-get install tig (Debian, Ubuntu)
    $ dnf install tig (Fedora)
    $ pacman -S tig (Arch Linux)
    $ apk add tig (Alpine)

## Installation on FreeBSD

You can use pkg to install Tig on FreeBSD:

    $ pkg install tig

## Installation on Windows

Easiest way is to install Git-for-Windows. As of version `2.14.2`, it comes bundled with `tig`.

Alternatively, you can also use it by installing cygwin. You must then install the packages `git`, `gcc-core`, `make`, `libiconv-devel` and `libncurses-devel`. Extract the tarball and install by using `configure` as explained above.

If you want to install from the sources, then you will also need the `automake` package (which will also install `autoconf`). Then run `make configure` and install by using `configure` as explained above.

## 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 macOS, 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_WORDEXP`: Define this variable to enable work-around for missing `wordexp()`.

- `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`).

- `TIG_USER_CONFIG`: Allow to customize the `tigrc` path (default `~/.tigrc`).

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.
PCRE | Adds support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in searches.
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.