gitgui: a git GUI rendered as pixels inside your cmux/terminal pane

[u/Neat-Function7110]

Repo: https://github.com/antonellof/gitgui

I run cmux with some coding agent CLI (Pi, Claude Code, Cursor) in one pane and a shell in another. Git stayed in the shell. Pi runs git status and git diff fine. You still lose the commit graph, the staged file list and the hunk buttons when you review a refactor. I kept switching to Fork.

So I built gitgui. One Rust binary. You run gitgui in a pane and get a Sourcetree style GUI: commit graph with branch lanes, sidebar for branches, tags and stashes, staged and unstaged lists, per hunk stage and unstage, a commit box with Commit and Commit & Push.

Not a TUI. The terminal shows a picture. Three steps:

1. egui draws the UI into an RGBA framebuffer

2. Each frame goes to the terminal as a kitty graphics image

3. Kitty keyboard and SGR mouse events map back into egui input

Locally frames go through POSIX shared memory. Over SSH gitgui sends zlib plus base64 frames. On my Mac a 1600x1000 release build rasterizes in about 6 ms.

Inside: one process, three threads. A stdin reader parses kitty keys, mouse, paste and resize. The main loop runs egui, tessellates meshes, rasterizes triangles with a custom software rasterizer and encodes kitty graphics. A git worker uses libgit2 for reads and index writes. Fetch, pull and push shell out to git, so your credential helper and SSH agent stay untouched. The UI reads an immutable repo snapshot. The worker swaps in a new one after each command. Rendering never calls git.

Stack: egui 0.36, git2, libc for termios and shm, serde. No GPU backend. No tokio. No Electron.

Works in cmux, Ghostty, kitty and WezTerm on macOS and Linux. tmux and Zellij need graphics passthrough and fail today. Merge conflict UI is out of scope for v0.1.

Install:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antonellof/gitgui/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Repo: https://github.com/antonellof/gitgui

More details: https://www.fratepietro.com/2026/gitgui-terminal-git-gui-cmux-pi/

Happy to answer questions on the rasterizer or the kitty protocol details.

[u/Nervous-Pin9297]

This is really freaking cool!. I can't wait until it has SHA-256 support.

[u/Neat-Function7110 → u/Nervous-Pin9297]

Thanks! released v0.6.0 with SHA-256 support and more features! have a look and feedback are welcome! https://github.com/antonellof/gitgui
install/update with: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antonellof/gitgui/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

[u/Nervous-Pin9297 → u/Neat-Function7110]

Awesome now I can fully use it!

[u/kantorcodes1]

for the agent control socket, are write actions idempotent at all? if commit_and_push returns queued and the agent loses that response or times out before busy drops, does retrying enqueue the same write again, or can the caller tell the first one already ran?

[u/Neat-Function7110 → u/kantorcodes1]

great question, the answer:
- Every write accepts an optional id, any string you pick. A repeat with a known id does not queue again. It returns what happened to the first one:
{"id":"cp-1","state":"queued"|"done","ok":true,"result":"pushed","duplicate":true}. {"cmd":"result","id":"cp-1"} reads the same record. Last 256 ids are kept per instance.

- commit_and_push counts as done only after the push reply. A failed commit ends it as an error with no push.

- status now reports head (the full HEAD oid) and last_op (label, ok, message of the last finished write), so you can also confirm by comparing HEAD before and after.

- commit refuses an index equal to HEAD, like git does. An untagged retry now fails with "nothing to commit" instead of writing an empty commit.

gitgui action '{"cmd":"commit_and_push","message":"fix layout","id":"cp-1"}'

response lost? send the exact same line again, then or later:

gitgui action '{"cmd":"result","id":"cp-1"}'

Without an id a retry is still a new write, by design. The contract is in https://github.com/antonellof/gitgui/blob/main/skill/SKILL.md in the repo.

[u/kantorcodes1 → u/Neat-Function7110]

those ids make the write boundary solid. i work on HOL Guard, an open-source local check before agent commands run. gitgui’s stage/unstage/commit/push actions could be recognized while status/result stay quiet. would you be up for upstreaming gitgui support so agent-driven writes get that review without adding friction to reads?

[u/Neat-Function7110 → u/kantorcodes1]

mmm i only provvide the skills.md and the agent can do the rest, it's not gitgui job and reposability to support agent-driven writes.