Blazing ๐ฅ fast terminal-ui for git written in rust ๐ฆ
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GitUI provides you with the comfort of a git GUI but right in your terminal

Table of Contents
- Features
- Motivation
- Benchmarks
- Roadmap
- Limitations
- Installation
- Build
- FAQs
- Diagnostics
- Color Theme
- Key Bindings
- Sponsoring
- Inspiration
- Contributing
- Contributors
1. Features Top โฒ
- 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 โฒ
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 โฒ
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 โ
| 0.17 โ
| 10 | No โ
| No โ
| | lazygit | 57 s | 2.6 | 25 | Yes | Sometimes | | tig | 4 m 20 s | 1.3 | 0.6 โ
| Sometimes | No โ
|
4. Road(map) to 1.0 Top โฒ
These are the high level goals before calling out 1.0:
- visualize branching structure in log tab (#81)
- interactive rebase (#32)
- no git-lfs support (see #2812)
5. Known Limitations Top โฒ
- no sparse repo support (see #1226)
- credential.helper for https needs to be explicitly configured (see #800)
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! โค๏ธ
6. Installation Top โฒ
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 overlaysudo 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
Mise
mise use -g gitui@latest
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-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
macOS
- gitui-mac.tar.gz (arm64)
- gitui-mac-x86.tar.gz (intel x86)
Windows
- gitui-win.tar.gz (single 64bit binary)
- gitui-win.msi (64bit Installer package)
Nightly Builds
see NIGHTLIES.md
7. Build Top โฒ
Requirements
- Minimum supported
rust/cargoversion:1.88
- To build openssl dependency (see https://docs.rs/openssl/latest/openssl/)
- 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
enablelibgit2 tracing
works if libgit2 built with -DENABLE_TRACE=ON
this feature enabled by default, to disable: cargo install --no-default-features
8. FAQs Top โฒ
see FAQs page
9. Diagnostics Top โฒ
To run with logging enabled run gitui -l.
This will log to:
- macOS:
$HOME/Library/Caches/gitui/gitui.log - Linux using
XDG:$XDGCACHEHOME/gitui/gitui.log - Linux:
$HOME/.cache/gitui/gitui.log - Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%/gitui/gitui.log
10. Color Theme Top โฒ

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 โฒ
The key bindings can be customized: See Key Config on how to set them to vim-like bindings.
12. Sponsoring Top โฒ
13. Inspiration Top โฒ
- It would be nice to come up with a way to have the map view available in a terminal tool14. Contributing Top โฒ
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
15. Contributors Top โฒ
Thanks goes to all the contributors that help make GitUI amazing! โค๏ธ
Wanna become a co-maintainer? We are looking for you!