Fork on Linux

Run Fork, the git client, on Linux. This flake runs Fork's Windows version on Wine, together with the Wine fixes and setup it needs to work well.

Fork is commercial software, so you'll need a license from fork.dev, the same as on Windows or macOS. This project isn't affiliated with Fork's authors and contains no code from Fork or Microsoft. The installer downloads Fork from Fork's own update feed and the .NET Framework and Windows SDK files from Microsoft, and checks every download against a known hash.

Getting started

You need Nix with flakes turned on, on x86_64 Linux. Any distribution works.

Install Fork, then start it:

nix run github:ben-page/fork_git_flake -- install
nix run github:ben-page/fork_git_flake

You can also open a repository straight away:

nix run github:ben-page/fork_git_flake -- ~/src/project

install also adds Fork to your desktop's app menu (KDE, GNOME and the others), so from then on you can start it from there. The menu entry runs the version of this flake you started last, and it works offline.

Once installed, Fork keeps itself up to date, just as it does on Windows. To stay on a release of this flake, use github:ben-page/fork_git_flake/v0.2.2.

The binary cache

Fork needs a patched Wine, which isn't in Nix's usual binary cache. CI builds it and uploads it to fork-git-flake.cachix.org, so you don't have to compile Wine yourself. The first time you run the flake, Nix asks whether to use that cache: answer y to both questions.

If Nix instead warns that it's ignoring an untrusted substituter, add these lines to /etc/nix/nix.conf and restart the Nix daemon:

extra-substituters = https://fork-git-flake.cachix.org
extra-trusted-public-keys = fork-git-flake.cachix.org-1:eGXL0NI1ALtyerG+XH//PjtAK9zIwo38fPKCwmWkL5c=

Without the cache, Nix builds Wine from source on the first run, which takes a while.

Commands

With nix run, put these after --, as above. If you install the flake with nix profile install github:ben-page/fork_git_flake, the command is just fork.

Command	What it does
fork [repository...]	Start Fork, opening any repositories you name
fork install	Set up the Wine prefix, install .NET Framework 4.8, the fonts and Fork, and add Fork to your app menu
fork uninstall	Remove Fork, its settings and license activation, the Wine prefix, the app menu entry and the downloads. It asks first; --yes skips the question. Your repositories aren't touched
fork exec <command...>	Run a command inside the prefix, such as regedit, winecfg or cmd
fork kill	Stop everything running in the prefix

Everything lives in ~/.local/share/fork-wine, apart from the app menu entry and Fork's downloads in ~/.cache/fork-wine, and fork uninstall removes all of it. If you installed the flake with nix profile install, also remove it with nix profile remove.

Settings

These are environment variables; none of them are required.

Variable	Default	What it does
FORK_HOME	~/.local/share/fork-wine	Where everything lives. The Wine prefix is in prefix/ inside it. The app menu entry starts the FORK_HOME that last ran fork install
FORK_DPI	your desktop's scale	Wine's DPI. By default it's 96 × the scale of KDE's primary display or sway's focused display on Wayland, and Xft.dpi on X11
FORK_WAYLAND	1	Use Wine's Wayland driver in a Wayland session. Set it to 0 to use X11 (Xwayland) instead
FORK_GIT		Set it to bundled to use the Git for Windows that comes with Fork instead of your own git. Not recommended (see Git)
FORK_GIT_TRACE		A file to log every git command Fork runs
WINEDEBUG	-all	Wine's debug logging

Git

Fork runs its git commands with your own git: the git on your PATH, or nixpkgs' git if you don't have one. Your ~/.gitconfig, credential helpers, SSH keys and agent, and hooks all work the way they do on the command line, and there's nothing to set up inside Fork. If git needs a password that nothing else provides, Fork asks for it in its usual prompt.

This is what git-bridge/ does. Inside Wine, Fork runs a small git.exe that converts the Windows paths in each command to Linux paths and hands the command to your git. For the few git commands that print absolute paths, it converts those back to Windows paths so Fork understands them.

Fork's bundled Git for Windows doesn't work well here. Wine has no execute bits, so it shows every executable file as modified, and its core.autocrlf=true setting rewrites line endings.

Known problems

• Fork's window is drawn in software rather than on the GPU (see below). That's fine for a git client.
• Resizing a large window lags a little behind the pointer: Fork takes about a fifth of a second to redraw at each new size.

What this fixes

Fork doesn't run on stock Wine. Each problem below was tracked down in Wine's and .NET's logs and fixed in its own commit.

• Fork crashes at start-up. Fork's theme code listens for Windows color changes. To do that, .NET Framework calls a WinRT function, RoGetParameterizedTypeInstanceIID, that Wine only stubs out, so Fork exits with E_NOTIMPL. patches/wine/ implements it, with conformance tests.
• .NET Framework 4.8 won't install. winetricks' dotnet48 fails in its .NET 4.0 step with MSI error 1603. Instead, the 4.8 installer runs directly, and the launcher adds the mscoree.dll loader from the 4.0 package and the registry keys it reads (dotnet.nix).
• Fork can't load Windows' type information. Wine generates WinRT metadata (.winmd files) for only a few types, under names .NET rejects. The launcher moves Wine's files aside and installs the Windows SDK's metadata where Wine looks for it (winrt.nix). It also installs System.Runtime.WindowsRuntime, which the .NET 4.8 installer leaves out on Windows 7, from the Windows 10 package inside the same installer.
• The window is blurry on HiDPI displays. Wine's DPI is set from your desktop's scale every time Fork starts.
• On Wayland, the window stops updating after the first frame. Wine's Wayland driver keeps showing a Direct3D surface's first frame, so WPF's hardware rendering is turned off.
• The pointer gets stuck after you drag the window. When the window asks the compositor to move or resize it, the compositor keeps the mouse button's release, so Fork thought the button was still held: it showed a "no" sign and ignored drags until the next click. patches/wine/ sends Fork the release.
• The window is hard to resize. Fork draws its own frame, so you could only grab its edge a few pixels inside the window. patches/wine/ adds an invisible border just outside the window's edges, like other windows have, where you can grab it.
• Two-finger scrolling on a touchpad does nothing. Wine's Wayland driver only scrolled for mouse wheels. patches/wine/ turns touchpad scrolling into wheel steps, about one for each wheel click's worth of finger movement.
• On a portrait monitor, a tall window is stretched instead of redrawn. Wine's Wayland driver ignored a display's rotation, so it took a portrait monitor for a landscape one and gave a window taller than the monitor's width a drawing buffer shorter than the window. The compositor stretched that buffer to fill the window, and clicks landed on the real layout rather than on what you saw. patches/wine/ carries Wine's pending fix (merge request 8647), which swaps a rotated display's width and height.
• The fonts are wrong. Windows' Segoe UI and Consolas aren't there, so text fell back to Tahoma, and bold and semibold text came out regular. Fork now gets Inter in place of Segoe UI and Hack in place of Consolas, drawn at 92% of their size to come closer to the Windows fonts, and Segoe UI becomes the system UI font, as on Windows (fonts/ui-fonts.py). The fonts are renamed "Inter UI" and "Hack UI" for Wine. Wine reports the system font by its full name, "Inter Regular", which WPF reads as a single regular face. And Wine ignores a font in the prefix that shares its name with one installed on your system.
• Resizing and switching repositories are slow. While you resized the window, Fork took about half a second to redraw at each new size, and switching to a large repository's tab froze it for a second or more. Wine's DirectWrite set up Inter's hinting from scratch for every glyph it measured or drew. patches/wine/ keeps that setup for reuse, which brings a resize step to about a fifth of a second and makes switching tabs quick.
• Some menu text is black. In Fork's dark menus, submenu headers had black text because WPF had fallen back to its old Classic theme. The .NET 4.8 installer skips WPF's Aero2 theme on Windows 7, and Wine names its Aero color scheme Blue where Windows says NormalColor, which WPF builds the theme's name from. The launcher installs Aero2, and patches/wine/ renames the color scheme.
• Git for Windows misreads Linux checkouts. Fork's git commands run on your Linux git instead (see Git).

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The Wine patches in patches/wine/ are licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later, like Wine itself.