how does tig compare to something like magit?

It only does a fraction of what magit does. I just use it for scrolling though the commit history, occasionally searching messages, and it's my tool of choice for staging/unstaging hunks.

It's the only tool I use to compliment the git cli.

I see. have you tried magit as a comparison? while magit can do everything it's got a very easy interface for most tasks. I don't use emacs for anything but magit to the point where i have a magit command on the command line to open up emacs in the current directory and then a spc-g-g opens up magit. it's that good.

So I use neovim as my editor, I'm familiar with fugitive but only use it for blaming.

I just prefer switching to my git tab in tmux and using the cli or tig deepening on what I'm doing.