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. Diagnostics
9. Color Theme
10. Key Bindings
11. Sponsoring
12. Inspiration

1. Features ^{Top ▲}

• 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)
• 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 commit log, diff committed changes
• Scalable terminal UI layout
• Async git API for fluid control

2. Motivation ^{Top ▲}

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 ▲}

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 ✅	0.17 ✅	1.4	No ✅	No ✅
lazygit	57 s	2.6	16	Yes	Sometimes
tig	4 m 20 s	1.3	0.6 ✅	Sometimes	No ✅

4. Road(map) to 1.0 ^{Top ▲}

These are the high level goals before calling out 1.0:

• log search (commit, author, sha) (#449,#429)
• visualize branching structure in log tab (#81)
• notify-based change detection (#1)
• interactive rebase (#32)
• popup history and back button (#846)
• submodule support (#1087)

5. Known Limitations ^{Top ▲}

• no support for GPG signing (see #97)
• 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 ▲}

For the time being this product is in alpha and is not considered production ready. However, for personal use it is reasonably stable and is being used while developing itself.

Arch Linux

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

Homebrew (macOS)

brew 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

Release Binaries

Available for download in releases

Binaries available for:

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

7. Build ^{Top ▲}

Requirements

• Minumum supported rust/cargo version: 1.50
  • See Install Rust

Cargo Install

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

Cargo Features

trace-libgit

enable libgit2 tracing

works if libgit2 builded with -DENABLE_TRACE=ON

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

8. Diagnostics ^{Top ▲}

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

9. Color Theme ^{Top ▲}

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

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

10. Key Bindings ^{Top ▲}

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

11. Sponsoring ^{Top ▲}

12. Inspiration ^{Top ▲}

• lazygit
• tig
• GitUp
  • It would be nice to come up with a way to have the map view available in a terminal tool
• git-brunch