tgitui

tgitui is a tiny terminal-based GIT user interface. It consists of a single file, written in POSIX shell, and should work on most GNU/Linux distributions.

It is simply a wrapper for the standard GIT commands.

I created it because I wanted frontends for git stash and git log, with the possibility of showing contents of commits/stashes, without having to copy/paste the commt/stash ID.

Warning

This script has not been checked for possible security issues. It could have bugs related to unescaped special characters and/or bugs with eval.

Sub-commands

• add - Interactively stage/unstage files from a list
• commits - Shows the log and allows the commits to be viewed
• diff - Shows diffs by file
• stashed - Shows stashed commits and allows viewing them

Sub-command names may be abbreviated as a/c/d/s

Each sub-command will present a list of files/commits/etc. Press Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown to navigate, Enter to select or Q to quit.

System Requirements

Most GNU/Linux distributions come with all of these pre-installed, except for GIT:

• GIT
• xterm-compatible terminal or Linux console (control sequences are hard-coded for these)
• POSIX shell (with local variable support). For example dash, or bash
• GNU coreutils: cut, dd, head, stty
• tput (part of ncurses)

Known Bugs

• Long commit messages or filenames messes up the display.
• The add subcommand only supports basic use cases (not merges etc.)
• The add subcommand could be improved with regards to usability.
• Cannot work with filenames with special characters
• Resizing the terminal window will mess up the output. Press Ctrl+L to refresh the contents.

See Also

• shedit - An earlier, and mostly useless, project in POSIX shell. It is a very basic editor. Probably not very useful in practice, but the README of that projects explains some of the implementation techniques/hacks that are used in both shedit and in tgitui.