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gitview

Quick start

A two-minute tour: serve a repo, walk the UI, learn the three keys worth knowing.

This page serves a repository and walks every major surface once. Any git checkout works; your own project is the most fun.

Serve a repository

cd ~/src/yourproject
gitview -open

-open launches your browser at http://127.0.0.1:9419, which redirects to /local/yourproject, the repository home. You get the github.com layout: the branch picker, the file table with per-file last-commit messages, the README rendered underneath, and a clone box on the right.

A few other targets to try later:

gitview ~/src                        # every repo under ~/src, with an index page
gitview gh:golang/go                 # github.com repo over the API, no clone
gitview hf:openai-community/gpt2     # a Hugging Face model

Walk the tree

Click into a directory, then a file. Blob pages have syntax highlighting, line numbers, and the same line anchors github.com has: click a line number, shift-click another to select a range, and the #L10-L20 URL is shareable. Markdown renders as on github.com, alerts and all; images, binaries, and LFS pointers each get a sensible page instead of a wall of bytes.

Read some history

The History button on any file, or Commits in the header, opens the commit list. Click a subject line for the full diff, split into files with per-hunk rendering, additions and deletions counted in the bar at the top. Blame on a blob page attributes every line, with the age heat bar github.com has, and lets you reblame at the commit before each hunk.

Learn three keys

Key What it does
t open the file finder, fuzzy match across every path at the current ref
y turn the URL into a permalink (ref becomes the full commit SHA)
? the full shortcut list, in a dialog

The finder is the one to internalize: t, a few characters, arrows if needed, Enter. It is the fastest way around any codebase. The full shortcut map has the rest.

Where to next

2 min read