You can also do:

git log --pretty=format:'%h %<(20)%an %s' -10

No need for shell magic or post processing with awk, column etc.

How to add a tab?

What you are looking for is:

%x09

Here is an example

git log --pretty=format:"%C(magenta)%h %C(cyan)%C(bold)%ad%Creset %C(cyan)%cr%Creset%x09 | %s %C(green)%Creset" --date=short

I wanted the relative date to be tabbed bc it was not a fixed length, this way all columns line up (for anything less than a year ago). Wanted to make it line up all of the time, but this is as far as I got before I ran out of time (ironically).

Hope this helps!

If you have suggestions to improve this answer for the relative year case (not just grepping out the year) happy to hear them too, feel free to edit this answer to add them if you know how to do it.

Edit:

I decided to try out the %<(n) syntax suggested by another person too, I found that it is too short if you have anything over 9 years bc 10 years is one more digit using %<(20) which was suggested. Instead I suggest %<(23)

git log --pretty=format:"%C(magenta) %h %C(cyan)%C(bold)%ad%Creset %<(23) %C(cyan)%cr%Creset %s%C(green)%Creset" --date=short`

Unless the project is over 100 years old it will line up great. But if you want it to work for that you just add 1 making it %<(24)

The problem with the tabular format is the fact that you might run out of space ...

The following one is my personal best compromise between the essential stuff to display:

• who
• did what
• and when
• to be able to dig more by the commit hash for the how

so:

  git log --pretty --format='%h %aI %<(15)%an ::: %s'

or

 git log --pretty --format='%h %cI %<(15)%an ::: %s'

if you want to get the commiter time and not the author time

This is give you the last 20 changes in nice view with numbering; You can change the colors

git log --pretty=format:"%C(magenta)%h %C(cyan)%C(bold)%ad %C(green)%<(20,trunc)%an%x09%Creset%C(yellow)%s%Creset" --date=short --color=always | head -20| cat -n