Blazing fast terminal client for git written in Rust

Features

• 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 and hunks
• Stashing (save, apply, drop, and inspect)
• Browse commit log, diff committed changes
• Scalable terminal UI layout
• Async input polling
• Async git API for fluid control

Benchmarks

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 ✅

Motivation

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 myself to help do features I use the most.

Known Limitations

• no support for push and pull yet (see #90)
• limited support for branching (see #90)
• 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! ❤️

Installation

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

There is an AUR package for gitui:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/gitui.git
cd gitui
makepkg -si

Fedora

sudo dnf install gitui

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install gitui

Release Binaries

Available for download in releases

Binaries available for:

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

Build

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

Diagnostics

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

Color Theme

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

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

Inspiration

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

Key Bindings

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