Features

GitCat is built around one idea: every operation that touches your history should be reversible. That shows up everywhere below, not just in the dedicated Safety Manager section.

Core graph + history

• Fast commit graph — reads via git2, laid out by a hand-tuned Rust swimlane algorithm, and streamed onto a virtualized canvas. No hard cap on history depth: the newest commits paint almost instantly while the rest of a very large history streams in behind them, and only the visible rows are ever drawn, so it stays smooth on repos with hundreds of thousands of commits. Scrolling keeps its text readable the whole time (a scroll-blit path copies the last frame and only redraws the thin newly-exposed strip, instead of re-rendering every row each frame).
• Instant everyday operations — switching branches, creating/renaming/deleting a branch or tag, and staging don't re-walk the whole history: the graph recognises the commit set is unchanged and updates its refs in place, so a checkout on a 150k-commit repo is immediate rather than a multi-second reload. Anything that genuinely adds or removes commits (commit, merge, pull, …) still does a full, correct reload.
• Orientation at a glance — a dedicated left branch/tag column keeps ref labels out of the message text, the current HEAD wears a clear "you are here" marker (an accent ring on its dot plus a bar down its row), and every commit already merged into your current branch is drawn dimmed so unmerged work stands out. ⌘⇧H (or the crosshair button in the top bar) recentres the graph on HEAD from wherever you've scrolled.
• Branch actions on the graph itself — right-click a branch or tag label to check out, rename, or delete it (or check out a remote-tracking branch), a menu separate from the commit right-click menu; hover any label to see its full name when it's truncated.
• Full commit detail panel — author/committer split (so you can actually tell a rebase or cherry-pick apart from the original commit), GPG signature status, diffstat, a file tree, and a syntax-highlighted diff that can expand to a full-page view — with a resizable file list and full paths on hover — for reading a real changeset comfortably.
• ⌘K command palette — fuzzy search across commits and refs (including branches that aren't currently shown in the sidebar — pick one and it appears on the graph), quick actions for Bisect, Reflog, Rerere, and Plumbing, and an in-app Help page, all without leaving the keyboard.
• Vim-style keyboard navigation — j/k to move a row at a time, gg/G to jump to the top or bottom of the graph, Ctrl-D/Ctrl-U to page through it, and / to search, all without touching the mouse.
• git blame — a line-annotation view with per-hunk attribution (commit SHA and author), an ignore-whitespace toggle, and it follows the file's rename history automatically.
• Per-file history — browse a single file's commits with rename-following, like git log --follow: a renamed file's history continues seamlessly under its old path instead of stopping cold at the rename.
• Search by author (git log --author) — list every commit by a given person across all history (matched against name and email), not just whatever's loaded on screen.
• Pickaxe / diff-content search (git log -S/-G) — find every commit whose diff touched a given string or pattern, not just the ones whose commit message happens to mention it.

Everyday git, made safe

• A resizable sidebar listing branches, remotes, tags, and snapshots, with a branch context menu for the usual operations.
• Branch visibility filter — hide/show branches individually to declutter a busy graph, "Hide all branches" to start from a clean slate before hand-picking a few, or flip on Auto to always show just the current branch plus anything with unpushed or unmerged work (and auto-hide branches that have gone stale).
• Live refresh — the graph and working-directory view pick up changes made outside GitCat (a terminal commit, another tool, a background fetch) on their own; a manual Refresh button is always there too if you ever want to force it.
• Tags — create, delete, and push tags right from the sidebar, no terminal needed.
• Checkout a local branch, or a remote one directly — checking out origin/feature-x creates and switches to a local tracking branch automatically, the way most people expect it to work.
• New Branch lets you pick the start point from any local or remote ref, not just HEAD.
• Fetch / Pull / Push, from the top bar or the native Repository menu — Pull asks you to choose merge or rebase explicitly, following your configured upstream automatically, so it never silently picks a strategy behind your back. Push a non-current branch, or push to a differently-named remote branch, right from the sidebar.
• Manage Remotes — add, edit, rename, and remove remotes from a dedicated dialog instead of hand-editing .git/config.
• Open Terminal — drop into a real terminal at the repo's root when you need a raw shell, from the Tools menu/⌘K.
• Revert is a first-class operation alongside cherry-pick and merge, not a workaround — right-click a commit to revert it, backed by the same 3-way conflict resolver when it doesn't apply cleanly.
• Right-click context menu on any commit row for cherry-pick, merge, or revert — the point-and-click alternative to drag-and-drop.
• Drag-and-drop cherry-pick and merge (shift-drag) directly onto HEAD, backed by a real 3-way conflict resolver when things don't apply cleanly.
• Merge strategy control — squash-merge, or an explicit fast-forward choice: auto (default), no-ff (always leaves a real merge commit), or ff-only (refuses unless a fast-forward is possible).
• Linear rebase onto any branch, including multi-commit conflict sequences and the ability to skip a commit mid-sequence.
• Interactive rebase — a drag-to-reorder planner (pick / edit / squash / fixup / drop) before it ever touches your history.
• git bisect — mark commits good/bad/skip, watch the candidate range narrow live on the canvas, and get the first-bad commit found automatically.
• Submodules — init/update (including --recursive), add, deinit/remove, and "Open" to manage a submodule exactly like its own top-level repo.
• Patch export/apply (git format-patch / git am) — hand a commit or range to someone outside GitCat, or bring one in, with real 3-way conflict resolution through the same resolver used everywhere else.
• Pluggable external diff/merge tools — hand a diff or a conflict off to your own configured tool (VS Code, Beyond Compare, or anything else) instead of GitCat's built-in view.
• git-filter-repo wizard — scope, preview, a typed confirmation, and a full backup/restore safety net for the one genuinely irreversible operation in the app.

Working directory

• Stage / unstage individual files, write a commit, or discard changes, from a real working-directory view — not just a flat list of file paths.
• Hunk and line-level staging (a git add -p equivalent) — select specific lines or a whole hunk in the working-directory diff and stage, unstage, or discard just those, not the whole file's change at once; a per-hunk toolbar plus per-line checkboxes with shift-click range select.
• Stash — save, apply, pop, and drop, the operations you actually reach for day to day.

Safety Manager

• Every mutation snapshots first. Global Undo (⌘Z) is always one keystroke away — and Undo is itself undoable, so there's no "point of no return" hiding behind a single click.
• Reflog rescue — browse every historical HEAD position this repo remembers and restore to any of them; the restore itself is just another snapshot-first, undoable mutation.
• rerere status/toggle panel — see what git has already recorded a resolution for, and flip rerere.enabled without touching a terminal.
• Checkout dirty-tree resolution — when switching branches would overwrite local changes, a chooser offers three explicit paths in increasing order of risk: stash → switch → reapply; stash → switch → leave stashed (recoverable later via Manage Stash); or force-switch and discard, genuinely irreversible and gated behind a typed danger-confirm.
• Force push, with a real choice between force-with-lease (refuses if the remote moved since your last fetch) and a raw override — both gated behind the same typed danger-confirm flow as every other irreversible action.
• Dangling-object recovery — runs git fsck to find a commit no branch, tag, or (often) reflog points to anymore, and recovers it as a new branch without ever touching your current branch or HEAD.

Setup + polish

• A first-run setup wizard: pick a repo (click, or drag a folder in), check/fix its git identity, and jump straight into the graph. Shown once, not on every launch.
• Close Repository — an in-app way back to the empty state, no need to quit and relaunch just to point GitCat at a different repo.
• Repositories dashboard (⌘O) — track the repos you use often and jump between them without hunting for the folder each time; a search box filters the list by name, path, or branch (Enter opens the top hit), and it's reachable from the Tools menu even when no repo is currently open.
• A real native app menu (File / Repository / Edit / View / Tools / Window / Help) and About panel — not just a default OS stub.
• Works with repos on a WSL path (\\wsl.localhost\<distro>\...) — remote operations (fetch/pull/push, submodules) route through the distro's own git, so credentials resolve the way they would inside WSL itself, not against Windows'.
• A Tools menu (and matching ⌘K actions) for Bisect, Reflog, Rerere, Plumbing, Manage Remotes, Pickaxe search, External Tools, Dangling Commits recovery, Repo file editors, and Patch export/apply, each opening on demand instead of sitting in a permanent panel.
• Repo file editors — view and edit .gitignore and .mailmap right inside GitCat, no dropping to a terminal or another editor required.
• Dark theme by default, with a light theme one click away.
• Eight Tama expressions reacting to what's actually happening — searching, thinking, celebrating, or genuinely alarmed when you're about to do something you can't take back — now wired into every relevant moment across the app, not just a couple of modals: Reflog Rescue, Dangling-Object Recovery, Plumbing, Pickaxe Search, and the Interactive Rebase planner all get mascot art, and filter-repo/conflict-resolution shows a genuine "thinking" face while it works instead of freezing on one expression the whole time.