git-knife 🔪

Stab your git history into shape — every commit's message, author, and dates, edited like a table.

A clean desktop GUI for editing git commit metadata directly — message, author date, committer date, author name/email.

Existing GUIs (GitKraken, Sublime Merge, Fork, lazygit) reword and reorder well but treat commit dates as effectively immutable and don't expose committer date / author identity for arbitrary commits. The tools that can rewrite that metadata (git-filter-repo, git rebase env tricks, git commit-tree) have no GUI. git-knife fills that gap.

It never reimplements git — it shells out to the system git CLI and rebuilds commits with git commit-tree, reusing each commit's original tree so file contents are provably never changed.

How it compares

Tool	Clean GUI	Reword msg	Reorder / squash / drop	Edit author date	Edit committer date	Edit author/email	Bulk find & replace (regex)
git-knife	✅	✅	🚧 planned	✅	✅	✅	✅
GitKraken	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ amend-only	❌	⚠️	❌
Sublime Merge	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	⚠️ amend	❌
Fork	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	⚠️	❌
SmartGit	✅	✅	✅	⚠️	❌	✅	❌
git-cola	◐	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌
lazygit (TUI)	◐ TUI	✅	✅	❌	❌	⚠️	❌
git-filter-repo (CLI)	❌	✅	via callback	✅	✅	✅	✅

Legend: ✅ first-class · ⚠️ possible but awkward/limited · ◐ dated or terminal UI · ❌ not supported · 🚧 planned.

The polished GUIs reword and reorder well but treat commit dates — especially the committer date — as effectively immutable, and none offer a bulk regex pass over author identity. The tools that can rewrite that metadata have no GUI. git-knife is the intersection: a clean GUI that edits every field, in bulk, safely.

Status (MVP)

• ✅ Open a repo, list commits on the current branch
• ✅ Edit message / author name+email / author date / committer date / committer name+email
• ✅ Bulk find & replace across those text fields, literal or regex (great for fixing a wrong email everywhere)
• ✅ Preview every change before applying
• ✅ Automatic backup ref before each rewrite + one-click restore
• ✅ Warns when a rewrite would touch already-pushed history
• ✅ Merge commits are locked (not editable in this version)
• ⛔ Not yet: reorder / squash / drop, merge rewriting, staging/branches/remotes

Requirements

• git (2.x)
• Node.js + pnpm (corepack enable pnpm, or npm i -g pnpm)
• Rust (stable) — install via https://rustup.rs
• Linux system deps for Tauri v2: webkit2gtk-4.1, libgtk-3, libayatana-appindicator3, librsvg2 (Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev)

Run (dev)

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

The first cargo build downloads and compiles the Tauri crates (a few minutes).

Build a bundle

pnpm tauri build

Packaging (tauri build) needs app icons. They're already committed under src-tauri/icons/; regenerate from any square PNG with pnpm tauri icon path/to/icon.png. Dev runs don't need them.

Automated releases (GitHub Actions)

.github/workflows/release.yml builds native installers for macOS, Linux, and Windows with tauri-action and attaches them to a draft GitHub Release. Cut a release by pushing a tag:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

(or trigger it manually from the repo's Actions tab). No code signing is set up yet, so macOS/Windows builds are unsigned — fine for early testers.

Editing history & pushing

Edit a commit

1. Open a repository (Browse… or paste the path).
2. Click any non-merge commit to expand its editor.
3. Change the message, author/committer name, email, or dates. Edited rows are highlighted; the date fields keep the commit's original UTC offset.
4. Click Review & apply, check the old → new preview, and confirm.

git-knife rewrites only your local branch. It never contacts a remote and never pushes for you — pushing is always your explicit step.

Bulk find & replace

Click Bulk find & replace above the commit table to change text across many commits at once:

• Pick which fields to target (message, author/committer name, author/committer email — any combination).
• Enter Find / Replace. Toggle Regex for pattern matching with $1 backreferences, or leave it off for a literal search. Case-sensitive is on by default.
• The panel live-counts matching commits and replacements. Click Stage edits to turn them into highlighted rows, then Review & apply as usual.

Example — move every commit from an old email to a new one: target Author email + Committer email, find old@example.com, replace new@example.com. Merge commits are skipped, and successive passes compose.

Push a rewrite

Editing a commit changes its hash and the hash of every commit after it, so your local branch and the remote have diverged. A normal git push is rejected as non-fast-forward. Push with a lease:

git push --force-with-lease origin <branch>

--force-with-lease refuses the push if the remote moved since your last fetch, so you can't silently clobber a teammate's commits. Prefer it over plain --force, which skips that safety check.

git-knife shows a "rewrites pushed history" warning when your edit reaches into commits that already exist on the upstream. If you can, edit only unpushed commits — rewriting shared history forces everyone else to re-sync.

After rewriting shared history

Anyone who already pulled the old commits now has divergent history. Each of them re-syncs their local branch to the new remote state:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/<branch>   # discards local-only commits — coordinate first

Undo a rewrite

• In-app: the Backups panel restores the pre-rewrite tip in one click.

• From the CLI: every apply saved a backup ref —

  git for-each-ref refs/knife-backup      # find the pre-rewrite tip
  git reset --hard <backup-ref-or-hash>   # move the branch back

  git reflog also lists the old tip. If you already force-pushed, restore locally and then git push --force-with-lease again.

Signature note (transparent)

By default git-knife attaches a small, disclosed note to each rewritten tip commit, on its own notes ref so it never touches your regular notes:

git notes --ref=git-knife show <commit>   # read it
git for-each-ref refs/notes/git-knife      # was this repo edited by git-knife?

It's invisible in a normal git log (separate ref) but fully discoverable — no hidden encoding. Toggle it off anytime with the 🔪 signature note checkbox in the app (the setting is remembered). To strip it from a repo entirely:

git update-ref -d refs/notes/git-knife

How it works

• src-tauri/src/git.rs — the only place that spawns git.
• commits.rs — open_repo, list_commits (NUL/record-separator parsing).
• rewrite.rs — preview_edits + apply_edits: rebuilds the chain from the earliest edited commit to the tip via commit-tree, then saves a backup ref and moves the branch with a compare-and-swap on the old tip.
• backup.rs — lists refs/knife-backup/* and restores via git reset --hard.

The rewrite strategy is validated at the git level by scratchpad/verify_engine.sh (reproduces the exact commit-tree flow and asserts the content diff is empty).

Safety

Every apply creates refs/knife-backup/<branch>/<epoch> pointing at the old tip before touching anything. Nothing is force-deleted; restore is always available from the Backups panel.