A great Git TUI: lazygit

Author

Marie-Hélène Burle

Content from the webinar slides for easier browsing.

Git interfaces

There are 3 main ways to use Git:

  • Through a Git GUI
  • From the command line
  • Integrated within IDE

They all have downsides:

  • Through a Git GUI      ➔  Slow and buggy
  • From the command line   ➔  Austere and unintuitive
  • Integrated within IDE     ➔  Limited

On the beauty of TUIs

Terminal user interfaces (TUIs) were precursors to graphical user interfaces (GUIs), but they did not disappear

People continue to build TUIs because they uniquely provide the speed of the command line and the easy of use of GUIs

GitHub is full of sleek, modern, open source TUIs for all sorts of applications

Several of them provide an interface to Git

My personal TUIs of choice are ranger as file manager and lazygit for Git

lazygit

With over 52k stars on GitHub, lazygit, created and maintained by Jesse Duffield is probably the most polished Git TUI

I followed it as it grew and developed over the past 5 years. It was great from the start, but by now, it is a truly beautiful mature tool

It is cross-platform. You can find installation instructions in the README

Get command options:

lazygit -h

Print default configurations with:

lazygit -c

lazygit is fully customizable

Resources

Time for a demo!

I will spend the rest of this webinar showing you how to use Git through lazygit