git-cola: The highly caffeinated Git GUI

git-cola is a powerful Git GUI with a slick and intuitive user interface.

Copyright (C) 2007-2015, David Aguilar and contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

SCREENSHOTS

Screenshots are available on the git-cola screenshots page.

DOWNLOAD

apt-get install git-cola

New releases are available on the git-cola download page.

FORK

git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git

git-cola on github

git-cola google group

NUTRITIONAL FACTS

ACTIVE INGREDIENTS

• git 1.6.3 or newer.

• Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2 or newer.

• PyQt4 4.4 or newer

• argparse 1.1 or newer. argparse is part of the stdlib in Python 2.7; install argparse separately if you are running on Python 2.6.

• Sphinx for building the documentation.

ADDITIVES

git-cola enables additional features when the following Python modules are installed.

send2trash enables cross-platform "Send to Trash" functionality.

BREWING INSTRUCTIONS

RUN FROM SOURCE

You don't need to install git-cola to run it. Running git-cola from its source tree is the easiest way to try the latest version.

git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git
cd git-cola
./bin/git-cola
./bin/git-dag

Having git-cola's bin/ directory in your path allows you to run git cola like a regular built-in Git command:

# Replace "$PWD/bin" with the path to git-cola's bin/ directory
PATH="$PWD/bin":"$PATH"
export PATH

git cola
git dag

The instructions below assume that you have git-cola present in your $PATH. Replace "git cola" with "./bin/git-cola" as needed if you'd like to just run it in-place.

INSTALLATION

Normally you can just do "make install" to install git-cola in your $HOME directory ($HOME/bin, $HOME/share, etc). If you want to do a global install you can do

make prefix=/usr install

There are also platform-specific installation methods. You'll probably want to use one of these anyways since they have a nice side-effect of installing git-cola's PyQt4 and argparse dependencies.

LINUX

Linux is it! Your distro has probably already packaged git-cola. If not, please file a bug against your distribution ;-)

arch

yaourt -S git-cola

debian, ubuntu

apt-get install git-cola

fedora

dnf install git-cola

gentoo

emerge git-cola

opensuse

Use the one-click install link.

MAC OS X

Before setting up homebrew, use pip to install sphinx.

Sphinx is used to build the documentation.

sudo pip install sphinx

Homebrew is the easiest way to install git-cola's Qt4 and PyQt4 dependencies. We will use homebrew to install the git-cola recipe, but build our own .app bundle from source.

brew install git-cola

Once brew has installed git-cola you can:

1. Clone git-cola

   git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git && cd git-cola

2. Build the git-cola.app application bundle

   make git-cola.app

3. Copy it to /Applications

   rm -fr /Applications/git-cola.app && cp -r git-cola.app /Applications

WINDOWS INSTALLATION

Download the latest stable Git, Python 2.x, and Py2x-PyQt4 installers

• msysGit

• Python

• PyQt

• git-cola Installer

Once these are installed you can run git-cola from the Start menu or by double-clicking on the git-cola.pyw script.

If you are developing git-cola on Windows you can use python.exe to run git-cola directly from source.

python.exe ./bin/git-cola

See "WINDOWS (continued)" below for more details.

DOCUMENTATION

• HTML documentation

• git-cola manual

• git-dag manual

• Keyboard shortcuts

• Contributing guidelines

GOODIES

git-cola ships with an interactive rebase editor called git-xbase. git-xbase can be used to reorder and choose commits and is typically launched through the git-cola's "Rebase" menu.

git-xbase can also be launched independently of the main git-cola interface by telling git rebase to use it as its editor:

env GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR="$PWD/share/git-cola/bin/git-xbase" \
git rebase -i origin/master

The quickest way to launch git-xbase is via the git cola rebase sub-command (as well as various other sub-commands):

git cola rebase origin/master

COMMAND-LINE TOOLS

The git-cola command exposes various sub-commands that allow you to quickly launch tools that are available from within the git-cola interface. For example, ./bin/git-cola find launches the file finder, and ./bin/git-cola grep launches the grep tool.

See git cola --help-commands for the full list of commands.

$ git cola --help-commands
usage: git-cola [-h]

                {cola,am,archive,branch,browse,classic,config,
                 dag,diff,fetch,find,grep,merge,pull,push,
                 rebase,remote,search,stash,tag,version}
                ...

valid commands:
  {cola,am,archive,branch,browse,classic,config,
   dag,diff,fetch,find,grep,merge,pull,push,
   rebase,remote,search,stash,tag,version}

    cola                start git-cola
    am                  apply patches using "git am"
    archive             save an archive
    branch              create a branch
    browse              browse repository
    classic             browse repository
    config              edit configuration
    dag                 start git-dag
    diff                view diffs
    fetch               fetch remotes
    find                find files
    grep                grep source
    merge               merge branches
    pull                pull remote branches
    push                push remote branches
    rebase              interactive rebase
    remote              edit remotes
    search              search commits
    stash               stash and unstash changes
    tag                 create tags
    version             print the version

WINDOWS (continued)

WINDOWS-ONLY HISTORY BROWSER CONFIGURATION UPGRADE

You may need to configure your history browser if you are upgrading from an older version of git-cola.

gitk was originally the default history browser, but gitk cannot be launched as-is on Windows because gitk is a shell script.

If you are configured to use gitk, then change your configuration to go through Git's sh.exe on Windows. Similarly,we must go through python.exe if we want to use git-dag.

If you want to use gitk as your history browser open the Preferences screen and change the history browser command to:

C:/Git/bin/sh.exe --login -i C:/Git/bin/gitk

Alternatively, if you'd like to use git-dag as your history browser, use:

C:/Python27/python.exe C:/git-cola/bin/git-dag

git-dag became the default history browser on Windows in v2.3, so new users should not need to configure anything.

BUILDING WINDOWS INSTALLERS

Windows installers are built using Pynsist. NSIS is also needed.

To build the installer using Pynsist:

1. (If building from a non-Windows platform), run ./contrib/win32/fetch_pyqt_windows.sh. This will download a PyQt binary installer for Windows and unpack its files into pynsist_pkgs/.
2. Run pynsist pynsist.cfg. The installer will be built in build/nsis/.

Before Pynsist, installers were built using InnoSetup. The InnoSetup scripts are still available:

./contrib/win32/create-installer.sh

You have to make sure that the file /share/InnoSetup/ISCC.exe exists. That is normally the case when you run the msysGit bash and not the Git for Windows bash (look here for the differences).