🔪 git-knife: Sculpt Your Git History Like a Spreadsheet

git-knife is a dedicated desktop GUI designed to let you "stab" your git history into the perfect shape. It treats your commit metadata—including messages, authors, and timestamps—as an editable table.

🎯 The Problem & The Solution

While popular GUIs like GitKraken, Sublime Merge, Fork, or lazygit are excellent for rewording messages or reordering commits, they generally treat commit dates as immutable. Furthermore, they rarely expose the "committer date" or allow for the modification of author identities across arbitrary commits.

On the other hand, powerful CLI tools like git-filter-repo or complex git rebase environment tricks can handle this, but they lack a visual interface.

git-knife fills this gap. It provides a polished GUI for bulk-editing every metadata field safely.

🛠️ Technical Approach

It is important to note that git-knife does not reimplement git. Instead, it:

Shells out to the system's git CLI.
Utilizes git commit-tree to rebuild commits.
Reuses the original commit's tree, ensuring that file contents are provably unchanged.

📊 Competitive Landscape

Tool	Clean GUI	Reword Msg	Reorder/Squash	Edit Author Date	Edit Committer Date	Edit Author/Email	Bulk Regex Replace
git-knife	✅	✅	🚧 Planned	✅	✅	✅	✅
GitKraken	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ Amend only	❌	⚠️	❌
Sublime Merge	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	⚠️ Amend	❌
Fork	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	⚠️	❌
SmartGit	✅	✅	✅	⚠️	❌	✅	❌
git-cola	◐	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	❌
lazygit (TUI)	◐	✅	✅	❌	❌	⚠️	❌
git-filter-repo	❌	✅ via callback	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

Legend: ✅ First-class $\cdot$ ⚠️ Awkward/Limited $\cdot$ ◐ Dated/TUI $\cdot$ ❌ Not supported $\cdot$ 🚧 Planned.

🚀 Project Status (MVP)

💻 Installation & Development

Prerequisites

Git: version 2.x
Node.js + pnpm: (Enable via corepack enable pnpm or npm i -g pnpm)
Rust: Stable version via rustup.rs
Linux Dependencies (Tauri v2): webkit2gtk-4.1, libgtk-3, libayatana-appindicator3, librsvg2

Debian/Ubuntu Install Command: sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev

Running the App

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Launch in development mode
pnpm tauri dev

Note: The initial cargo build may take several minutes to compile Tauri crates.

Building the Bundle

pnpm tauri build

To update app icons, use a square PNG: pnpm tauri icon path/to/icon.png.

CI/CD

Automated releases are handled via .github/workflows/release.yml using tauri-action. To trigger a release:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

Note: Builds are currently unsigned for macOS/Windows.

📖 User Guide

Editing History

Open Repo: Browse for your folder or paste the path.
Modify: Edit the table. Changed rows are highlighted; UTC offsets are preserved.
Apply: Click Review apply $\rightarrow$ check the "Old $\rightarrow$ New" preview $\rightarrow$ Confirm.

Important: git-knife never contacts remotes or pushes automatically.

Bulk Find & Replace

Use the Bulk find replace tool to modify multiple commits simultaneously:

Target: Select fields (e.g., Author Email + Committer Email).
Mode: Use Regex (supports $1 backreferences) or Literal.
Workflow: Stage edits $\rightarrow$ Review apply.

Example: Changing old@email.com to new@email.com across the entire history.

Pushing Rewritten History

Because changing metadata alters the commit hash, the local and remote branches will diverge. Mathematically, the new hash $H_{new}$ is a function of the modified metadata: $H_{new} = \text{sha1}(\text{tree} + \text{parent} + \text{modified\_metadata})$

The Safe Way to Push

Avoid git push --force. Instead, use:

git push --force-with-lease origin <branch>

--force-with-lease prevents you from accidentally overwriting a teammate's work if the remote has moved since your last fetch.

Handling Shared History

If you rewrite commits that others have already pulled, they must re-sync:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/<branch>

Warning: This discards local-only commits. Coordinate with your team first!

Undoing Changes

If a rewrite goes wrong, you have two options:

In-App: Use the Backups panel for a one-click restore.

CLI: Find the backup ref and reset:

git for-each-ref refs/knife-backup
git reset --hard <backup-ref-or-hash>

Show HN: Git-knife – edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet