Blazing fast terminal client for git written in Rust

Table of Contents

1. Features
2. Benchmarks
3. Motivation
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: 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. 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 ✅

3. Motivation ^{Top ▲}

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

Over the last 2 years my go-to GUI tool for this was fork because it was snappy, free, and not bloated. Unfortunately the free part will change soon and so I decided to build a fast and simple terminal tool to help with features I use the most.

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)
• file history log (#381)
• more tag support (#483)
• visualize branching structure in log tab (#81)
• inspect file tree at specific revision (#714)

5. Known Limitations ^{Top ▲}

• no support for conflict resolution yet (see #485)
• no support for bare repositories (see #100)
• no support for core.hooksPath config

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

gitui currently lacks essential features in git like push, pull, and checkout. The priorities are the basics (add, commit), and on features that are making me mad when done on the git shell, like stashes and hunks. Eventually, I will be able to work on features that could lead to making gitui a one stop solution to get rid of the shell entirely - but for that I need help - this is just a spare time project right 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

Release Binaries

Available for download in releases

Binaries available for:

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

7. Build ^{Top ▲}

Requirements

• Latest rust and cargo
  • 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

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