bubblegit

A git TUI built on Bubble Tea v2, aiming to be fast on large repositories and more interactive than the alternatives.

Status: early. Milestone 1 is complete — a two-pane browser showing the working tree and syntax-highlighted diffs. It is read-only: nothing stages, commits or writes yet.

Why shell out to git

bubblegit runs the real git binary rather than reimplementing git in Go. That means your hooks, commit.gpgsign, credential helpers, core.pager and the rest of your actual git configuration all work, with no special cases. Tools built on a pure-Go git library silently break some of that.

The cost is a process spawn per read, so the read paths use plumbing commands with -z (never porcelain), page the log by cursor rather than offset, and run off the render loop. internal/git/exec_bench_test.go measures each read against a budget so that stays true.

Requirements

• Go 1.27+
• git 2.30+
• A terminal with truecolor. Kitty keyboard protocol and mouse support are used where available and degrade cleanly where they are not.

Running

go run ./cmd/bubblegit    # from anywhere inside a git repository

j/k move, g/G jump to the ends, ctrl+d/ctrl+u half-page, tab switches pane, t toggles the diff between the worktree and staged sides, q or ctrl+c quits.

Below 48 columns the layout drops to a single pane and tab swaps which one is visible.

Development

go test ./...                  # unit tests and golden files
go test ./... -update          # re-record golden files after a UI change
go test ./internal/git -bench . # read-path benchmarks
go test ./... -short           # skip the 100k-commit fixture

Test fixtures are generated, not checked in. testdata/fixtures/mksmall.sh builds a repo covering the cases that break naive parsers — paths with spaces and non-ASCII bytes, a file with no trailing newline, a merge commit, and a tree that is simultaneously staged, unstaged and untracked. mkbig.sh builds 100k commits in about eleven seconds via git fast-import.

Both pin author and committer identity and dates and null out global and system config, so SHAs are byte-identical across runs and machines. Golden files depend on that.

Milestones

M0	✅ git layer, fixtures, benchmark harness, app skeleton
M1	✅ files pane and syntax-highlighted diff, read-only
M2	Staging by hunk and by line
M3	Commit and amend
M4	Log pane, commit detail, commit graph
M5	Branch pane
M6	Performance pass, mouse, resizable splitter

License

MIT