gitl

A terminal UI for browsing git history, with vim-style navigation.

Features

• Commit list — scrollable log of commits showing date, author, ref decorations (branches/tags/HEAD), and subject line.
• Commit detail — full metadata and commit message, plus a highlighted, scrollable diff with a sticky header showing which file is currently in view.
• Vim-style keys throughout — hjkl/arrows, ctrl-d/ctrl-u half-page paging, g/G to jump to top/bottom.
• Search — / to search, n/N to cycle matches (wrapping at both ends), with all matches highlighted and the current one visually distinct. In the commit list, search covers author name and the full commit message; in the commit detail view, it covers the diff content. Commits that don't match a search are dimmed in the list, so a match whose only hit is in the message body (nothing visible to highlight in the row) still stands out by contrast with the surrounding non-matches.
• Handles large repositories: commits are fetched in lazily-loaded batches rather than all at once, so startup and memory use don't scale with the size of the history. Searching the list only loads as much history as a match actually requires, rather than the whole log up front.

Installation

Requires Go 1.25+ and git on your PATH.

go install github.com/maiwald/gitl@latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/maiwald/gitl.git
cd gitl
go build -o gitl .

Usage

Run it inside any git repository:

gitl

Keybindings

Key(s)	Action
j/k, ↓/↑	Move down/up
ctrl-d / ctrl-u	Half-page down/up
g / G	Jump to top / bottom
Enter	Open commit detail
[ / ]	Jump to previous/next file's diff (detail view)
/	Search (author + message, or diff content)
n / N	Next / previous search match (wraps)
Esc / q	Back (detail view) / quit (list view)
ctrl-c	Quit

Known limitations

• Merge commits show metadata and message only; their diff isn't rendered yet (there's no single canonical diff for a merge, and picking one is deferred).
• Diff content doesn't have language-aware syntax highlighting, only add/delete/context coloring.
• In the commit list, a commit that matches search only via its full message body (not the one-line subject shown in the row) counts toward the match total but has nothing visible to highlight in that row — distinguishable from a true non-match only by not being dimmed.
• Detail-view search covers diff content only, not the commit message.

Development

go build ./...     # build everything
go vet ./...        # static checks
go test ./...        # run the test suite
go run .             # run against the repo you're standing in

See CLAUDE.md for more on the project's structure and conventions.