Bit (1.0) – a modern Git CLI in Go

Hi all,<p>I&#x27;m the creator of Bit. Bit is all about making your life just a little bit easier. It helps you spend less time fiddling with Git and more time developing code.<p>Whether it&#x27;s autocompletion at your finger tips, sorting branches by most recent, checking out PR&#x27;s with ease or auto-fast-forwarding when possible - Bit has your back!

Git is what happens when a technology is born out of hardcore engineering. Most of the world could greatly benefit from its functionality but it’s too hard for non software-engineers to learn. I hope the next era of version control thinks about the problem from a less technically inclined user’s perspective. Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any good alternatives that make version control easy? I personally love git, but want to see it’s benefits brought to a wider base of people. Projects like Bit are a step in the right direction.

I’m generally very skeptical of anything that abstracts away git with UIs. This looks really cool though and I like that you embedded common git workflows into the CLI

Bit needs just one single switch and everyone will gladly use it for its killer feature.<p>Undo with one single command, without strange additional arguments, weird naming, strange documentation[1] etc.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net</a><p>When anyone is doing the &quot;next best thing after bread and butter&quot; version control, please start with --undo switch.<p>Sometimes you just need a hammer, without any will or need to learn how to make hammers.

&gt; --- Coming Soon ---<p>&gt; bit anticipates when you&#x27;ll need to type git status and will display it proactively<p>huh?

The git CLI definitely leaves room for improvement and thus for projects such as this one but I personally feel that the git plugin for your preferred shell and a custom set of git aliases adjusted to your personal workflow will get you most of the benefits an improved git CLI can provide. This also yields a better understanding of git itself which will be beneficial if you have to use git in an environment without any extras.

&gt; bit fix for all the times you did something you really wish you didn&#x27;t<p>Enlightenment is when you realise git is append-only and doesn&#x27;t let you do anything you wish you hadn&#x27;t.<p>The trouble is with any git &quot;frontend&quot; is it builds on top of git&#x27;s existing abstractions. To make a good cli for git you would strip everything back to just the DAG manipulation functions and then invent a new language on top.

There&#x27;s also lazygit[1], which is written in Go.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jesseduffield&#x2F;lazygit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jesseduffield&#x2F;lazygit</a>

What does modern mean in this context?

These changes should be ported to the original git cli command. Really good stuff here!

I think the developer did a great job with this project. It&#x27;s really interesting looking at how the developer tries to reduce complexity out of git. However, I don&#x27;t know how useful this is. It&#x27;s another layer of abstraction which adds complexity. You now have to learn git _AND_ bit--and I&#x27;m not sure git is complex enough to me that it justifies this. The escape hatch out of bit is that it&#x27;s &quot;fully compatible with git allowing you to fallback to git if need be.&quot;<p>git alias is a form of abstraction and I use that to simplify my git workflow. I may even have a few scripts that do more complicated stuff. But it&#x27;s limited. The feature list of bit is pretty significant. That&#x27;s a lot of cognitive load and I&#x27;m wondering if &#x2F; when did bit start to take on more complexity than it took away.

Looks very interesting, congrats!<p>A common mistake I have come across a few times (and seen others fall victim to as well) is forgetting to stage a file that&#x27;s necessary for the new feature or fix they just committed.<p>Do you think that identifying these cases and suggesting to stage them is something in line with the project? (e.g. while trying to commit: &quot;You imported file X in a file you staged, but it is currently being ignored, do you wish to stage it as well?&quot;)

Using a modern shell like fish and cli tools like fzf, sed, sort etc together to create abbreviations (not aliases in fish) give you 100x more features than this.<p>I type ck and get a fzf list of local and remote branches I can fuzzy search and select to checkout.

Does this support bare git repos? That is the only feature I miss from Emacs magit - my favorite Git client.

Yeah this is great but the power of git is kinda in its ubiquity like bash or cURL it’s everywhere and the lowest common denominator.<p>I can’t help another dev if they need this installed for me to be helpful, etc...<p>I really wish changes like this got upstreamed.

&gt; Automatic fetching &amp; fast forwarding to keep your branches up to date and prevent merge conflicts<p>Doesn&#x27;t that negate the advantages of `push --force-with-lease` over `--force`?

The most common workflow of git, to me, is when i want to move changes between branches (for staged and unstaged changes).<p>Is there example here ?

How did you do the autocomplete previews? Is that a feature of cobra?

love the autocomplete previews.<p>i love using CLI. curious what others here thing of this as well as any IDE&#x27;s they prefer to use.

Great idea and looks pretty and useful. But, I am out because of the single binary and go. Dynamic linking allows better control of the system and security.