Work quickly, safely, and without headaches. The Git interface you've been missing all your life has finally arrived.

Git recently celebrated its 10 years anniversary, but most engineers are still confused by its intricacy (3 of the top 5 questions of all time on Stack Overflow are Git related). Since Git turns even simple actions into mystifying commands (“git add” to stage versus “git reset HEAD” to unstage anyone?), it’s no surprise users waste time, get frustrated, distract the rest of their team for help, or worse, screw up their repo!

GitUp is a bet to invent a new Git interaction model that lets engineers work quickly, safely, and without headaches. It's unlike any other Git client out there from the way it’s built (it interacts directly with the Git database on disk), to the way it works (you manipulate the repository graph instead of manipulating commits).

With GitUp, you get a truly efficient Git client for Mac:

• A live and interactive repo graph (edit, reorder, fixup, merge commits…),
• Unlimited undo / redo of almost all operations (even rebases and merges),
• Time Machine like snapshots for 1-click rollbacks to previous repo states,
• Features that don’t even exist natively in Git like a visual commit splitter or a unified reflog browser,
• Instant search across the entire repo including diff contents,
• A ridiculously fast UI, often faster than the command line.

GitUp was created by @swisspol in late 2014 as a bet to reinvent the way developers interact with Git. After several months of work, it was made available in pre-release early 2015 and reached the top of Hacker News along with being featured by Product Hunt and Daring Fireball. 30,000 lines of code later, GitUp reached 1.0 mid-August 2015 and was released open source as a gift to the developer community.

Learn all about GitUp and download the latest release from http://gitup.co.

Read the docs and visit the community forums for support & feedback.

Releases notes are available at https://github.com/git-up/GitUp/releases. Builds tagged with a v (e.g. v1.2.3) are released on the "Stable" channel, while builds tagged with a b (e.g. b1234) are only released on the "Continuous" channel. You can change the update channel used by GitUp in the app preferences.

To build GitUp yourself, simply run these commands in Terminal:

1. git clone https://github.com/git-up/GitUp.git
2. cd GitUp
3. git submodule update --init --recursive

Then open the GitUp/GitUp.xcodeproj Xcode project and hit Run.

GitUp is built as a thin layer on top of a reusable generic Git toolkit called "GitUpKit". This means that you can use that same GitUpKit framework to build your very own Git UI!

The GitUpKit source code is organized as 2 independent layers communicating only through the use of public APIs:

Base Layer (depends on Foundation only)

• Core/: wrapper around the required minimal functionality of libgit2, on top of which is then implemented all the Git functionality required by GitUp (note that GitUp uses a slightly customized fork of libgit2)
• Extensions/: categories on the Core classes to add convenience features implemented only using the public APIs

UI Layer (depends on Foundation and AppKit)

• Interface/: low-level view classes e.g. GIGraphView to render the GitUp Map view
• Utilities/: interface utility classes e.g. the base view controller class GIViewController
• Components/: reusable single-view view controllers e.g. GIDiffContentsViewController to render a diff
• Views/: high-level reusable multi-views view controllers e.g. GIAdvancedCommitViewController to implement the entire GitUp Advanced Commit view

GitUpKit has a very different goal than ObjectiveGit. Instead of offering extensive raw bindings to libgit2, GitUpKit only uses a minimal subset of libgit2 and reimplements everything else on top of it (it has its own "rebase engine" for instance). This allows it to expose a very tight and consistent API, that completely follows Obj-C conventions and hides away the libgit2 complexity and sometimes inconsistencies. GitUpKit adds on top of that a number of exclusive and powerful features, from undo/redo and Time Machine like snapshots, to entire drop-in UI components.

Using the API should be pretty straightforward since it is organized by functionality (e.g. repository, branches, commits, interface components, etc...) and a best effort has been made to name functions clearly.

For all the "Core" APIs, the best way to learn them is to look at the associated unit tests - for instance see the branch tests for the branch API.

Here are some simplified sample code to get you started (error handling is left as an exercise to the reader):

Opening and browsing a repository:

// Open repo
GCRepository* repo = [[GCRepository alloc] initWithExistingLocalRepository:<PATH> error:NULL];

// Make sure repo is clean
assert([repo checkClean:kGCCleanCheckOption_IgnoreUntrackedFiles error:NULL]);

// List all branches
NSArray* branches = [repo listAllBranches:NULL];
NSLog(@"%@", branches);

// Lookup HEAD
GCLocalBranch* headBranch;  // This would be nil if the HEAD is detached
GCCommit* headCommit;
[repo lookupHEADCurrentCommit:&headCommit branch:&headBranch error:NULL];
NSLog(@"%@ = %@", headBranch, headCommit);

// Load the *entire* repo history in memory for fast access, including all commits, branches and tags
GCHistory* history = [repo loadHistoryUsingSorting:kGCHistorySorting_ReverseChronological error:NULL];
assert(history);
NSLog(@"%lu commits total", history.allCommits.count);
NSLog(@"%@\n%@", history.rootCommits, history.leafCommits);

Modifying a repository:

// Take a snapshot of the repo
GCSnapshot* snapshot = [repo takeSnapshot:NULL];

// Create a new branch and check it out
GCLocalBranch* newBranch = [repo createLocalBranchFromCommit:headCommit withName:@"temp" force:NO error:NULL];
NSLog(@"%@", newBranch);
assert([repo checkoutLocalBranch:newBranch options:0 error:NULL]);

// Add a file to the index
[[NSData data] writeToFile:[repo.workingDirectoryPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"empty.data"] atomically:YES];
assert([repo addFileToIndex:@"empty.data" error:NULL]);

// Check index status
GCDiff* diff = [repo diffRepositoryIndexWithHEAD:nil options:0 maxInterHunkLines:0 maxContextLines:0 error:NULL];
assert(diff.deltas.count == 1);
NSLog(@"%@", diff);

// Create a commit
GCCommit* newCommit = [repo createCommitFromHEADWithMessage:@"Added file" error:NULL];
assert(newCommit);
NSLog(@"%@", newCommit);

// Restore repo to saved snapshot before topic branch and commit were created
BOOL success = [repo restoreSnapshot:snapshot withOptions:kGCSnapshotOption_IncludeAll reflogMessage:@"Rolled back" didUpdateReferences:NULL error:NULL];
assert(success);
  
// Make sure topic branch is gone
assert([repo findLocalBranchWithName:@"temp" error:NULL] == nil);
  
// Update workdir and index to match HEAD
assert([repo resetToHEAD:kGCResetMode_Hard error:NULL]);

There's an example mini-app called GitDown that prompts the user for a repo and displays an interactive and live-updating list of its stashes (all with ~20 lines of code in -[AppDelegate applicationDidFinishLaunching:]):

Through GitUpKit, this mini-app also gets for free unlimited undo/redo, unified and side-by-side diffs, text selection and copy, keyboard shortcuts, etc...

The GitDown source code also demonstrates how to use some other GitUpKit view controllers as well as building a customized one.

Pull requests are welcome but be aware that GitUp is used for production work by many thousands of developers around the world, so the bar is very high. The last thing we want is letting the code quality slip or introducing a regression.

The following is a list of absolute requirements for PRs (not following them would result in immediate rejection):

• You MUST use 2-spaces for indentation instead of tabs
• The coding style MUST be followed exactly (there is no style guide available but you can figure out from browsing the source)
• Additions to Core/ MUST have associated unit tests
• Each commit MUST be a single change (e.g. adding a function or fixing a bug, but not both at once)
• Each commit MUST be self-contained i.e. GitUp builds and remains fully functional when building it at this very commit
• Commit messages MUST have:
• A clear and concise title that starts with an uppercase and doesn't end with a period e.g. "Changed app bundle ID to com.example.gitup" not "updated bundle id."
• Unless it is trivial, a detailed summary explaining the change using full sentences and with punctuation (no need to wrap at 80 characters but keep lines to a reasonable length)
• The pull request MUST contain as few commits as needed
• The pull request MUST NOT contain fixup or revert commits (flatten them beforehand using GitUp!)
• The pull request MUST be rebased on latest master when sent

Be aware that GitUp is under GPL v3 license, so any contribution you make will be GPL'ed.

• @swisspol: concept and code
• @wwayneee: UI design
• @jayeb: website

Also a big thanks to the fine libgit2 contributors without whom GitUp would have never existed!

GitUp is copyright 2015 Pierre-Olivier Latour and available under GPL v3 license. See the LICENSE file in the project for more information.

IMPORTANT: GitUp includes some other open-source projects and such projects remain under their own license.