hideGit

A cross-platform desktop Git client written in Rust, with pull request alerts built in.

Pre-alpha, and a daily driver for ordinary work. Clone or open a repository, scroll its history, read any commit's diff, stage by file, by hunk or by individual line, commit, branch, stash, and fetch, pull and push — with progress you can watch and cancel. Sign in to GitHub and open pull requests appear in the sidebar with their review and CI state, with desktop notifications when one of them changes.

History rewriting works: merge, rebase, cherry-pick, revert and reset, with a three-pane conflict resolver — a rebase that conflicts on three separate commits can be finished without opening a terminal. Interactive rebase has a plan editor where you reorder, squash, fixup, edit and drop, and nothing runs until you start it. Drag a branch onto another on the graph to merge or rebase it. Search every commit by summary, message, author or hash. Blame any file at any revision. Dark and light themes, both designed against the same contrast rules rather than one inverted.

Past 1.0's scope and already in: submodules and worktrees in the sidebar — with the actions each allows, and none git would refuse — Git LFS files shown as sizes rather than pointers, with the ones you have not fetched named as such, --autosquash, and a Brazilian Portuguese translation.

Two caveats worth knowing before you rely on it. Pushing over SSH with a passphrase, or over HTTPS with a credential helper, has not been verified — it should work, since hideGit hands those operations to your own git, but every remote in the test suite is a local path. And on macOS, notifications are attributed to whatever binary sent them, so run the bundle from cargo run -p xtask -- bundle-macos rather than cargo run if you want them to say hideGit.

See ROADMAP for what ships when, and ARCHITECTURE for how it is built.

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What it does

hideGit visualises a repository's history and lets you work in it — stage, commit, branch, push, resolve conflicts — and tells you when something needs your attention on a pull request.

Where it needs to say no, it says so and shows you Git's own words. A checkout that would overwrite your changes fails with the list of files rather than stashing them somewhere you did not ask for; a rejected push shows the hint that tells you what to do about it; a deletion that Git refuses stays refused rather than being retried with --force.

• Commit graph as the primary view. History is the thing you reason about, so it gets the centre of the window. Target: 60fps scrolling on a 100,000-commit repository.
• Pull request alerts. A native desktop notification when a review is requested, when CI turns red, or when your open PR starts conflicting.
• Native rendering. iced draws on the GPU via wgpu. No web view.
• Reads on gitoxide. History traversal, status and diff run on a pure-Rust Git implementation, so no C toolchain is needed to build.
• Your Git configuration is the one that applies. Push, merge and rebase run through your system git, so credential helpers, hooks, submodules and LFS behave as you configured them.

Features

	Feature	Milestone
✅	Commit graph, commit details, file tree, diff viewer	M1
✅	Stage / unstage by file, hunk and line, discard, commit, amend	M2
✅	Clone, branches, tags, stash, remotes, fetch / pull / push with progress	M3
✅	GitHub PR alerts + native notifications	M4
✅	Merge, rebase, cherry-pick, revert, reset, conflict resolution UI	M5
✅	Interactive rebase editor, graph drag-and-drop, blame, commit search, light theme, settings	M6
✅	Syntax-highlighted diffs, file filter within a commit, update check that never installs	M6
✅	Multi-repository tabs, command palette, shortcut reference, remappable shortcuts, custom themes	M6
🟡	Accessibility: focus ring, keyboard routes and contrast are done	M6
⛔	Screen-reader support — iced 0.14 has no accessibility surface to build on	M6
⛔	Signed installers — needs a paid certificate. Downloads are unsigned and say so	M6
✅	Submodules: both commits when they disagree, plus update and init	Post-1.0
✅	Worktrees: what each checkout holds, add, remove and prune	Post-1.0
✅	Git LFS: sizes instead of pointers, and which objects are not fetched	Post-1.0
✅	--autosquash, a draggable rebase plan, and a Brazilian Portuguese translation	Post-1.0

Legend: ⬜ planned · 🟡 in progress · ⛔ blocked on something outside this repository · ✅ shipped

Nothing here is 🟡 by omission. The two ⛔ rows are not being worked on and will not be until the thing they wait for exists: a toolkit that can talk to a screen reader, and a certificate somebody has paid for.

A few more screens

Stage by file, by hunk, or by line. Staged, changed and untracked stay separate lists, and the diff carries its own Stage file and Stage hunk buttons rather than hiding them in a menu.	The light theme is designed, not inverted. Both themes are checked against the same contrast rules, including the syntax colours in a diff.
Everything is reachable from the keyboard. The palette shows each command's shortcut, so it teaches the binding rather than replacing it.	Screenshots are of hideGit's own repository, on macOS. Nothing here is a mockup: it is the release build opened on this repository, so the commits in the graph are the ones in the log above.

Requirements

Git must be installed and on your PATH.

This is a deliberate architectural choice, not an oversight. hideGit reads repositories with gitoxide, but delegates operations that write to a remote or rewrite history — push, merge, rebase — to your system git. gitoxide does not implement push yet, and delegating means hideGit inherits your credential helpers, hooks, submodules, Git LFS and SSH agent configuration exactly as you have them configured, rather than reimplementing each one imperfectly.

The full reasoning, including how this changes as gitoxide matures, is in ADR-0002.

	Minimum
Git	2.30 or newer, on PATH
Rust	1.88 or newer (to build from source)
Platforms	macOS 11+, Windows 10+, Linux with Vulkan / OpenGL 3.3

Installing

Download the archive for your platform from the releases page:

Platform	File
macOS 11+, Intel and Apple Silicon	hidegit-<version>-macos-universal.zip
Windows 10+	hidegit-<version>-windows-x86_64.zip
Linux, glibc 2.35 or newer	hideGit-<version>-x86_64.AppImage, or hidegit-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

These builds are not signed with a developer certificate, so macOS and Windows each ask once whether you meant to run it. That is the trade for shipping downloads now rather than when there is a certificate to pay for; RELEASING.md explains what changes when there is.

• macOS — unzip, drag hideGit.app to Applications, open it. The first launch is refused: go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the message about hideGit, and choose Open Anyway. Control-click → Open stopped working as a bypass in macOS 15.

• Windows — unzip and run hidegit.exe. SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC"; choose More info → Run anyway.

• Linux — chmod +x the AppImage and run it; nothing to unpack and nothing to install. Or take the tarball, run ./hidegit, and PREFIX=~/.local ./install.sh for a launcher entry and icons.

  The AppImage is one file with the desktop entry and icons inside it, not a way to avoid installing anything: hideGit reaches Wayland, X11, Vulkan and OpenGL through dlopen at runtime, so those still come from your distribution and always will. Bundling a graphics driver is how an AppImage ends up running only on the machine that built it.

Every release carries a SHA256SUMS.txt to check a download against. There are no .dmg or .msi packages — an unsigned installer would add a step without removing the warning that justifies it — and no Flatpak, for a different reason: a sandbox cannot see the credential helpers, hooks and LFS setup that hideGit deliberately borrows from your own git. See RELEASING.md.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/youhide/hideGit
cd hideGit
cargo run --release                      # opens the welcome screen
cargo run --release -- /path/to/a/repo   # opens a repository straight away

No C toolchain is needed — a consequence of choosing gitoxide over libgit2. On Linux you will also need the usual windowing and font development packages (libxkbcommon-dev, libwayland-dev, libfontconfig1-dev, or your distribution's equivalents).

Installing locally

For a build from source that behaves like an installed application rather than a binary in target/. These are the same steps the release workflow runs.

macOS. A window icon does nothing here — macOS has no per-window icons and reads the Dock icon from an application bundle — so there is a task that builds one:

cargo build --release
cargo run -p xtask -- bundle-macos       # target/release/bundle/hideGit.app

The bundle is ad-hoc signed, which is what lets it run on Apple Silicon at all; it is not notarised. A bundle you built yourself was never downloaded, so it carries no quarantine attribute and Gatekeeper stays out of the way.

Linux. Installs the binary, a .desktop entry and the hicolor icon set. PREFIX defaults to /usr/local; point it at ~/.local to avoid needing root, and pass uninstall to reverse it:

cargo build --release
PREFIX=~/.local ./packaging/linux/install.sh

The .desktop entry matters more than it sounds: Wayland ignores window icons and identifies an application by matching its app_id against an installed entry, so on Wayland this is what puts the icon in the overview and the dock.

Windows. The icon is linked into hidegit.exe at build time, so cargo build --release is enough for Explorer, the taskbar and Alt-Tab to show it. There is nothing else to install.

Built with

iced 0.14	GUI toolkit — the Elm architecture, GPU-rendered
gitoxide (gix) 0.86	Git read operations, in pure Rust
system git	Push, merge, rebase — see ADR-0002
octocrab 0.54	GitHub API client, and the device flow (M4)
keyring 4	Tokens in the OS keychain — never in a file, never in a log
notify-rust 4	Native desktop notifications

Documentation

Document	What it covers
ARCHITECTURE	Crate layout, the GitBackend seam, forge integration, concurrency, known limits
ROADMAP	Milestones M0–M6 with acceptance criteria
UI_SPEC	Screens, state and message shapes, keyboard shortcuts, theming
COMMIT_GRAPH	Lane assignment algorithm and rendering
RELEASING	How a release is cut, what ships, and why nothing is signed yet
ADRs	Why each major technical decision was made
screenshots	How the images above are taken, and how to retake them

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — the project is early enough that foundational decisions are still open to argument. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, and read the ADRs before proposing a change to an architectural choice.

By participating you agree to the Code of Conduct. Security issues: please follow SECURITY.md rather than opening a public issue.

License

GPL-3.0 © hideGit contributors.