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GitUI provides you with the comfort of a git GUI but right in your terminal

Table of Contents

  1. Features
  2. Motivation
  3. Benchmarks
  4. Roadmap
  5. Limitations
  6. Installation
  7. Build
  8. FAQs
  9. Diagnostics
  10. Color Theme
  11. Key Bindings
  12. Sponsoring
  13. Inspiration
  14. Contributing
  15. Contributors

1. Features Top β–²

  • Fast and intuitive keyboard only control
  • Context based help (no need to memorize tons of hot-keys)
  • Inspect, commit, and amend changes (incl. hooks: pre-commit,commit-msg,post-commit,prepare-commit-msg)
  • Stage, unstage, revert and reset files, hunks and lines
  • Stashing (save, pop, apply, drop, and inspect)
  • Push / Fetch to / from remote
  • Branch List (create, rename, delete, checkout, remotes)
  • Browse / Search commit log, diff committed changes
  • Responsive terminal UI
  • Async git API for fluid control
  • Submodule support
  • gpg commit signing with shortcomings (see #97))

2. Motivation Top β–²

I do most of my git work in a terminal but I frequently found myself using git GUIs for some use-cases like: index, commit, diff, stash, blame and log.

Unfortunately popular git GUIs all fail on giant repositories or become unresponsive and unusable.

GitUI provides you with the user experience and comfort of a git GUI but right in your terminal while being portable, fast, free and opensource.

3. Benchmarks Top β–²

For a RustBerlin meetup presentation (slides) I compared lazygit,tig and gitui by parsing the entire Linux git repository (which contains over 900k commits):

Time Memory (GB) Binary (MB) Freezes Crashes
gitui 24 s βœ… 0.17 βœ… 1.4 No βœ… No βœ…
lazygit 57 s 2.6 16 Yes Sometimes
tig 4 m 20 s 1.3 0.6 βœ… Sometimes No βœ…

4. Road(map) to 1.0 Top β–²

These are the high level goals before calling out 1.0:

  • visualize branching structure in log tab (#81)
  • interactive rebase (#32)

5. Known Limitations Top β–²

  • no sparse repo support (see #1226)
  • no git-lfs support (see #1089)
  • credential.helper for https needs to be explicitly configured (see #800)

Currently, this tool does not fully substitute the git shell, however both tools work well in tandem.

The priorities for gitui are on features that are making me mad when done on the git shell, like stashing, staging lines or hunks. Eventually, I will be able to work on making gitui a one stop solution - but for that I need help - this is just a spare time project for now.

All support is welcomed! Sponsors as well! ❀️

6. Installation Top β–²

GitUI is in beta and may contain bugs and missing features. However, for personal use it is reasonably stable and is being used while developing itself.

Packaging status

Various Package Managers

Install Instructions
pacman -S gitui
Fedora
sudo dnf install gitui
Gentoo

Available in dm9pZCAq overlay

sudo eselect repository enable dm9pZCAq
sudo emerge --sync dm9pZCAq
sudo emerge dev-vcs/gitui::dm9pZCAq
sudo zypper install gitui
Homebrew (macOS)
brew install gitui
port install gitui
Winget (Windows)
winget install gitui
Scoop (Windows)
scoop install gitui
Chocolatey (Windows)
choco install gitui
Nix (Nix/NixOS)

Nixpkg

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.gitui

NixOS

nix-env -iA nixos.gitui
Termux (Android)
pkg install gitui
conda install -c conda-forge gitui

Release Binaries

Available for download in releases

Binaries available for:

Linux

  • gitui-linux-x86_64.tar.gz (linux musl statically linked)
  • gitui-linux-aarch64.tar.gz (linux on 64 bit arm)
  • gitui-linux-arm.tar.gz
  • gitui-linux-armv7.tar.gz

All contain a single binary file

macOS

  • gitui-mac.tar.gz (intel Mac, uses Rosetta on Apple silicon, single binary)

Windows

  • gitui-win.tar.gz (single 64bit binary)
  • gitui-win.msi (64bit Installer package)

Nightly Builds

see NIGHTLIES.md

7. Build Top β–²

Requirements

Cargo Install

The simplest way to start playing around with gitui is to have cargo build and install it with cargo install gitui --locked. If you are not familiar with rust and cargo: Getting Started with Rust

Cargo Features

trace-libgit

enable libgit2 tracing

works if libgit2 built with -DENABLE_TRACE=ON

this feature enabled by default, to disable: cargo install --no-default-features

8. FAQs Top β–²

see FAQs page

9. Diagnostics Top β–²

To run with logging enabled run gitui -l.

This will log to:

  • macOS: $HOME/Library/Caches/gitui/gitui.log
  • Linux using XDG: $XDG_CACHE_HOME/gitui/gitui.log
  • Linux: $HOME/.cache/gitui/gitui.log
  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%/gitui/gitui.log

10. Color Theme Top β–²

gitui should automatically work on both light and dark terminal themes.

However, you can customize everything to your liking: See Themes.

11. Key Bindings Top β–²

The key bindings can be customized: See Key Config on how to set them to vim-like bindings.

12. Sponsoring Top β–²

github

13. Inspiration Top β–²

14. Contributing Top β–²

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

15. Contributors Top β–²

Thanks goes to all the contributors that help make GitUI amazing! ❀️

Wanna become a co-maintainer? We are looking for you!