git-cola: The highly caffeinated Git GUI
git-cola is a powerful Git GUI with a slick and intuitive user interface.
Copyright (C) 2007-2020, 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 install git-cola
New releases are available on the git-cola download page.
FORK
git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git
NUTRITIONAL FACTS
ACTIVE INGREDIENTS
-
git 1.6.3 or newer.
-
Python 2.6 or newer (Python 2+3 compatible).
-
QtPy 1.1.0 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.
git-cola uses QtPy, so you can choose between PyQt4, PyQt5, and PySide by setting the QT_API environment variable to pyqt4, pyqt5 or pyside as desired. qtpy defaults to pyqt5 and falls back to pyqt4 if pyqt5 is not installed.
Any of the following Python Qt libraries must be installed:
Set QT_API=pyqt4 in your environment if you have both versions of PyQt installed and want to ensure that PyQt4 is used.
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
You can also start cola as a Python module if Python can find it.
cd git-cola
python -m cola
python -m cola 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.
DOCUMENTATION
INSTALLATION
Normally you can just do "make install" to install git-cola in your $HOME directory ($HOME/bin, $HOME/share, etc). If you want to do a global install you can do
make prefix=/usr install
The platform-specific installation methods below use the native package manager. You should use one of these so that all of git-cola's dependencies are installed.
Distutils is used by the Makefile via setup.py to install git-cola and its launcher scripts. distutils replaces the #!/usr/bin/env python lines in scripts with the full path to python at build time, which can be undesirable when the runtime python is not the same as the build-time python. To disable the replacement of the #!/usr/bin/env python lines, pass USE_ENV_PYTHON=1 to make.
LINUX
Linux is it! Your distro has probably already packaged git-cola. If not, please file a bug against your distribution ;-)
arch
Available in the AUR.
debian, ubuntu
apt install git-cola
fedora
dnf install git-cola
gentoo
emerge git-cola
opensuse, sle
zypper install git-cola
slackware
Available in SlackBuilds.org.
FreeBSD
# install from official binary packages
pkg install -r FreeBSD devel/git-cola
# build from source
cd /usr/ports/devel/git-cola && make clean install
Ubuntu
The default version on 18.04 is older and is missing features and enhancements. Use this PPA maintained by @pavreh to get a newer version.
MAC OS X
Homebrew is the easiest way to install git-cola's Qt4 and PyQt4 dependencies. We will use Homebrew to install the git-cola recipe, but build our own .app bundle from source.
Sphinx is used to build the documentation.
brew install sphinx-doc
brew install git-cola
Once brew has installed git-cola you can:
-
Clone git-cola
git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git && cd git-cola -
Build the git-cola.app application bundle
make \ PYTHON=$(brew --prefix python3)/bin/python3 \ PYTHON_CONFIG=$(brew --prefix python3)/bin/python3-config \ SPHINXBUILD=$(brew --prefix sphinx-doc)/bin/sphinx-build \ git-cola.app -
Copy it to /Applications
rm -fr /Applications/git-cola.app && cp -r git-cola.app /Applications
Newer versions of Homebrew install their own python3 installation and provide the PyQt5 modules for python3 only. You have to use python3 ./bin/git-cola when running from the source tree.
UPGRADING USING HOMEBREW
If you upgrade using brew then it is recommended that you re-install git-cola's dependencies when upgrading. Re-installing ensures that the Python modules provided by Homebrew will be properly set up.
This is required when upgrading to a modern (post-10.11 El Capitan) Mac OS X. Homebrew now bundles its own Python3 installation instead of using the system-provided default Python.
# update homebrew
brew update
# uninstall git-cola and its dependencies
brew uninstall git-cola
brew uninstall pyqt5
brew uninstall sip
# re-install git-cola and its dependencies
brew install git-cola
WINDOWS INSTALLATION
IMPORTANT If you have a 64-bit machine, install the 64-bit versions only. Do not mix 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
Download and install the following:
Once these are installed you can run Git Cola from the Start menu.
See "WINDOWS (continued)" below for more details.
GOODIES
git cola ships with an interactive rebase editor called git-cola-sequence-editor. git-cola-sequence-editor is used to reorder and choose commits when rebasing. Start an interactive rebase through the "Rebase" menu, or through the git cola rebase sub-command to use the git-cola-sequence-editor:
git cola rebase origin/main
git-cola-sequence-editor can be launched independently of git cola by telling git rebase to use it as its editor through the GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR enviironment variable:
env GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR="$PWD/bin/git-cola-sequence-editor" \
git rebase -i origin/main
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,config,
dag,diff,fetch,find,grep,merge,pull,push,
rebase,remote,search,stash,tag,version}
...
valid commands:
{cola,am,archive,branch,browse,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
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
HACKING
The following commands should be run during development:
# Run the unit tests
$ make test
# Run tests and longer-running pylint and flake8 checks
$ make check
# Run tests against multiple python interpreters using tox
$ make tox
The test suite can be found in the test directory.
The tests are set up to run automatically when code is pushed using Travis CI. Checkout the Travis config file for more details.
Auto-format po/*.po files before committing when updating translations:
$ make po
When submitting patches, consult the contributing guidelines.
SOURCE INSTALL
For Linux/Unix-like environments with symlinks, an easy way to use the latest git cola is to keep a clone of the repository and symlink it into your ~/bin directory. If $HOME/bin is not already in your $PATH you can add these two lines to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc to make the linked tools available.
PATH="$HOME/bin":"$PATH"
export PATH
Then, install git-cola by linking it into your ~/bin:
mkdir -p ~/src ~/bin
git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git ~/src/git-cola
(cd ~/bin &&
ln -s ../src/git-cola/bin/git-cola &&
ln -s ../src/git-cola/bin/git-dag)
You should then get the latest git cola in your shell.
PACKAGING NOTES
Git Cola installs its modules into the default Python site-packages directory (eg. lib/python2.7/site-packages), and in its own private share/git-cola/lib area by default. The private modules are redundant and not needed when cola's modules have been installed into the site-packages directory.
Git Cola will prefer its private modules when the share/git-cola/lib directory exists, but they are not required to exist. This directory is optional, and can be safely removed if the cola modules have been installed into site-pacakges and are importable through the default sys.path.
To suppress the installation of the private (redundant) share/git-cola/lib/cola package, specify make NO_PRIVATE_LIBS=1 ... when invoking make, or export GIT_COLA_NO_PRIVATE_LIBS=1 into the build enviornment.
make NO_PRIVATE_LIBS=1 ...
Git Cola installs a vendored copy of its QtPy dependency by default. Git Cola provides a copy of the qtpy module in its private modules area when installing Git Cola so that you are not required to install QtPy separately. If you'd like to provide your own qtpy module, for example from the python-qtpy Debian package, then specify make NO_VENDOR_LIBS=1 ... when invoking make, or export GIT_COLA_NO_VENDOR_LIBS=1 into the build environment.
make NO_VENDOR_LIBS=1 ...
Python3 users on debian will need to install python3-distutils in order to run the Makefile's installation steps. distutils is a Python build requirement, but not needed at runtime.
WINDOWS (continued)
Development
In order to develop Git Cola on Windows you will need to install Python3 and pip. Install PyQt5 using pip install PyQt5 to make the PyQt5 bindings available to Python.
Once these are installed you can use python.exe to run directly from the source tree. For example, from a Git Bash terminal:
/c/Python36/python.exe ./bin/git-cola
Multiple Python versions
If you have multiple versions of Python installed, the contrib/win32/cola launcher script might choose the newer version instead of the python that has PyQt installed. In order to resolve this, you can set the cola.pythonlocation git configuration variable to tell cola where to find python. For example:
git config --global cola.pythonlocation /c/Python36
BUILDING WINDOWS INSTALLERS
Windows installers are built using
To build the installer using Pynsist run:
./contrib/win32/run-pynsist.sh
This will generate an installer in build/nsis/.
WINDOWS 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:/Program Files/Git/bin/sh.exe" --login -i C:/Git/bin/gitk
git-dag became the default history browser on Windows in v2.3, so new users should not need to configure anything.
The push is successful but Git Cola hangs in this state. This issue is currently not always reproducible.
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