Adding on to your helpful comment, you can also get a more concise, gitk-like graph of commits with `git log --graph`. This is my standard alias for viewing history, which also adds colors and tag/branch names:

    lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %C(magenta)(%cn)%Creset %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative --left-right