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. Contributors

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,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

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:

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

5. Known Limitations ^{Top ▲}

• no sparse repo support (see #1226)
• 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 ▲}

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.

Various Package Managers

Install Instructions

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

openSUSE

sudo zypper install gitui

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install gitui

MacPorts (macOS)

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

Anaconda

conda install -c conda-forge gitui 

Release Binaries

Available for download in releases

Binaries available for:

Linux

• gitui-linux-musl.tar.gz (linux on x86_64)
• 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.msi (64bit Installer package)

7. Build ^{Top ▲}

Requirements

• Minimum supported rust/cargo version: 1.70

  • See Install Rust

• To build openssl dependency (see https://docs.rs/openssl/latest/openssl/)

  • perl >= 5.12 (strawberry perl works for windows https://strawberryperl.com/)
  • a c compiler (msvc, gcc or clang, cargo will find it)

• To run the complete test suite python is required (and it must be invocable as python)

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 ▲}

see FAQs page

9. 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

10. Color Theme ^{Top ▲}

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 ▲}

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

12. Sponsoring ^{Top ▲}

13. 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

14. Contributors ^{Top ▲}

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

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