gitst

A real-time, glanceable interactive git status monitor typically used in a small terminal pane alongside for instance your coding editor/IDE, a coding agent, and other terminal panes.

Gitst is meant to sit in one pane of a multi-pane setup (Dantty, tmux, screen, herdr, WezTerm etc.) next to for instance a coding agent and a shell, and show what is happening to the repository as it happens: changed files, commits, pushes, fetches, merges and rebases.

Note that by design, gitst monitors git, it doesn't manipulate it. This comes with a few benefits, especially for use in conjunction with team work and coding agents where you might want the coding agent to control git, there's lots of team activity on the repo, or, like me, you just want to control git manually. Because it is a git monitor, apart from git fetch, gitst never changes your git repository, and it never takes over git's index.lock, so it cannot get in the way or obstruct git commands run elsewhere.

Install

With Homebrew (macOS and Linux):

brew install dfallman/tap/gitst

Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux and Windows are on the releases page. Or build from source with Cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/dfallman/gitst

Requires git on your PATH.

Use

Run gitst inside a repository, or gitst <path>. If the directory is not a repository yet, gitst waits and picks it up once git init or git clone has run there.

It does its best to adapt to the terminal window it operates in: sections collapse, borders give way to rules, and columns drop out as the pane shrinks, down to a single branch ↑1 ● line. Mouse support is enabled by default, so you can easily click around in the interface, collapse and expand panels, and view details by clicking on items. Gitst is also entirely operable using its keyboard shortcuts (see below).

The dashboard has five sections:

• Changes: staged, unstaged, untracked and conflicted files, with +/− line counts. A • marks a file that just changed.
• Activity: a timeline of commits, amends, checkouts, merges, rebases, resets, pulls, cherry-picks, pushes, fetches, staging, stashes and file edits. Edits that come within a minute of each other merge into one row.
• Commits: recent history, with ↑ on commits not yet pushed.
• Branches and Stashes: folded by default.

Warnings appear under the header for conflicts, an index.lock held for more than 10 seconds, failed fetches and config errors.

Mouse

• Click a file, commit, branch, stash or activity row to open it full-pane (diffs, commit details, ahead/behind lists). Click ‹ back, press Esc, or right-click to return.
• Click a section title to fold it. The wheel scrolls what is under the pointer.
• Click ↻ (or press f) to fetch now.

Keys

Key	Dashboard	Detail view
j k / ↓ ↑	move	move / scroll
Enter / l / →	open, or fold a section title	open
Esc / h / ← / Backspace	clear selection	back
Tab / Shift-Tab	next / previous section
Space	fold section	page down
PgDn / PgUp		page down / up
g / G / Home / End	top / bottom	top / bottom
w		wrap long lines
f	fetch now	fetch now
?	help	help
q / Ctrl-C	quit	quit
Ctrl-Z	suspend (fg resumes; not on Windows)	suspend

Options

gitst [PATH] [--no-fetch] [--interval <DURATION>]
gitst --version

• --no-fetch turns off background fetching. ↻ and f still fetch.
• --interval 10m sets the time between background fetches (30s, 5m, 1h).
• -V / --version prints the version.

Config

Optional. gitst reads the first of these that exists: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gitst/config.toml (when that is set), %APPDATA%\gitst\config.toml (Windows) and ~/.config/gitst/config.toml. All keys are optional; these are the defaults:

fetch_interval = "5m"               # "0" turns the timer off; ↻ and f still work
fetch_prune = false                 # pass --prune to background fetches
collapsed = ["branches", "stashes"] # sections that start folded
icons = "none"                      # "nerd" for Nerd Font icons
pulse_seconds = 10                  # how long a changed file stays marked
max_changes = 1000                  # most changed files to list
numstat_max_files = 500             # skip +/− counts above this many changes

Section names for collapsed are changes, activity, commits, branches and stashes. Unknown keys and invalid values are named in the UI and keep their defaults; the rest of the file still applies.

Notes

• Colours come from your terminal's own palette, so gitst follows light and dark themes. When the terminal reports its background colour, gitst uses it for subtle tints.
• gitst follows status.showUntrackedFiles. When it is not set, untracked directories are listed file by file.
• Diffs are always read plain, whatever your color.*, diff.external or pager settings. Untracked symlinks show their target, and FIFOs and devices are never read.
• Background fetches run without a terminal, so they can never prompt for a password. If a fetch fails, gitst shows fetch failed: auth (or offline, timeout, or git's message) and retries with backoff, doubling from the fetch interval up to an hour (5, 10, 20, then 60 minutes by default). A fetch that runs longer than a minute is stopped.
• Pushes appear in Activity when they were made from this clone. Git only records them in the remote-tracking reflog.
• Changes are picked up by watching the working tree and .git, skipping ignored paths. If the watcher cannot start, gitst polls every 3 seconds.

Note on AI use

I've been writing code for over 30 years, and lately LLM agent-assisted coding has rekindled my sense of awe at what code can do. This project was built in Rust using a range of tools, including Anthropic's Claude Code. For me, these tools are simply means to move faster, explore more ideas, and test those ideas and implementations more rigorously than I could (or would ever do) on my own.