GitUp

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.

Getting Started

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.xcodeproj Xcode project.

Source Layout

GitUp source code is organized as 3 independent layers communicating only through the use of public APIs:

Foundation 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 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

Application Layer

• Application/: essentially the "glue code" connecting all the above layers together into an actual app (and therefore not really clean code contrary to the rest of GitUp)

GitUpKit

GitUp is built on top of a reusable generic Git toolkit called GitUpKit, which is simply the Foundation and UI layers described above combined into a standalone framework. This means that with GitUpKit you can build your very own Git UI!

There's an example mini-app called GitDown that prompts the user for a repo and displays a live-updating stash view (all in ~20 lines of code):

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...

Contributing

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):

• The coding style of GitUp MUST be followed exactly
• 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 functional if only building this commit and not its descendants
• 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."
• A detailed summary explaining the change unless it is trivial using full sentences with punctuation (no need to wrap at 80 characters but keep lines to a reasonnable 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.

Credits

• @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!

License

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.