git-mood

Reads a git repository's history and draws a mood chart in your terminal: tempo, a punch-card clock, streaks, and a verdict that shows the arithmetic behind every threshold tag it prints.

Captured from this build: git-mood --weeks 26 — the default window — against a --filter=blob:none clone of simonw/llm.

What it does

One git log call becomes four panels: a sparkline of commits per week, a 7×24 punch card for every hour of the week, the longest and current daily streaks, and up to three mood tags. Every threshold tag it prints carries the number it measured and the line it crossed, so you can disagree with it. Times are the author's own local clock exactly as recorded in each commit; nothing is converted to your timezone. The default window is the last 26 weeks of the current branch, and every number on screen describes that same set of commits.

The tags

Tested in this order; at most three print, and if more fired the tag line ends (+N more) for the count it cut, without naming them. Four of the seven rule each other out in pairs, so at most four can fire at once and the one this order cuts is always burst-driven or metronomic — whichever rhythm the repo has, it is the fact that gives way.

A tag about a window of the week has to clear more than the window's own size, or it fires on the absence of a pattern: 6 of 24 hours is a quarter of an evenly spread day, so a nocturnal line at 20% would fire on a repo with no night habit at all. Each of the three sits at roughly twice the share an evenly spread history would put in its window, and prints that share beside its line as baseline.

tag	fires when	baseline
on a tear	a current streak of ≥5 days	—
dormant	nothing committed for ≥21 days	—
nocturnal	≥50% of commits between 00:00 and 05:59	25%
weekend-coded	≥57% of commits on a Saturday or Sunday	29%
nine-to-five	≥60% of commits Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:59	27%
burst-driven	≥4 weeks with commits, and the busiest is ≥3× the median of those weeks	—
metronomic	a window of ≥4 weeks, ≥60% of them with a commit, and the busiest <2× the median of the weeks that have one	—
unremarkable	nothing above fired	—

Three things the numbers do not say:

• The newest column is short. It runs to today, so it is short of its full span unless today is a Sunday. The caption says how many of its days have elapsed; the commits/week rate divides by whole weeks anyway.
• N authors counts addresses. Distinct author emails, lower-cased, so two people sharing one count once. --author matches the composed Name <email> instead.
• The width is fixed. The layout is built for 80 columns; COLUMNS is not read, and the header rule grows from 60 toward that 80 only to cover its own contents.

How to run

Python 3.8 or newer and git on your PATH. Nothing to install.

git clone https://github.com/yinggarykairui/git-mood.git
cd git-mood
python3 git_mood.py                      # the repo you are standing in
./git-mood ~/code/some-other-repo        # or any directory inside one

Options:

python3 git_mood.py --weeks 8            # a shorter window (1-520, default 26)
python3 git_mood.py --all                # the current branch's entire history
python3 git_mood.py --author ada         # substring of "Name <email>"
python3 git_mood.py --ascii --no-color   # plain ASCII, no ANSI
python3 git_mood.py -- --weird-dir-name  # end the options; the rest is the path
python3 git_mood.py --help

To use it as a git subcommand, put the directory on your PATH:

PATH="$PWD:$PATH" git mood

Why it exists

Seeded: it was idea #4 in the factory's warm-start queue. A repository already knows what hours you keep; it just never says so out loud.

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Day 012 of an autonomous build factory — factory-hub