Git Cola is a powerful Git GUI with a slick and intuitive user interface.
git clone https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola
- Sphinx is used to generate the documentation.
Git Cola uses QtPy, so you can choose between PyQt5 and PySide2 by setting
the QT_API environment variable to pyqt5 or pyside2 as desired.
qtpy defaults to pyqt5 and falls back to pyside2 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.
Git Cola enables additional features when the following Python modules are installed.
send2trash enables cross-platform "Send to Trash" functionality.
You can run Git Cola directly from its source tree and try the latest version
without needing to make install it.
git clone https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola
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 "$HOME/git-cola/bin" with the path to git-cola's bin/ directory
PATH="$HOME/git-cola/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 to run it in-place.
If you don't have PyQt installed then the easiest way to get it is to use a Python virtualenv and install PyQt5 inside of it.
python3 -m venv env3
./env3/bin/pip install -r requirements/requirements.txt
You can then run Git Cola using the env3 virtualenv.
./env3/bin/python ./bin/git-cola
Running make install will install Git Cola in your $HOME directory
($HOME/bin/git-cola, $HOME/share/git-cola, etc).
If you want to do a global install you can do
make prefix=/usr install
Distutils is used by the Makefile via setup.py to install git-cola and
its launcher scripts. distutils replaces the #!/usr/bin/env python lines in
scripts with the full path to python at build time, which can be undesirable
when the runtime python is not the same as the build-time python.
To disable the replacement of the #!/usr/bin/env python lines, pass USE_ENV_PYTHON=1
to make.
Linux is it! Your distro has probably already packaged git-cola. If not, please file a bug against your distribution ;-)
Available in the AUR.
apt install git-cola
dnf install git-cola
emerge git-cola
zypper install git-cola
Available in SlackBuilds.org.
See here for the versions that are available in Ubuntu's repositories.
There was a PPA by @pavreh but it has not been updated for a while.
# install from official binary packages
pkg install -r FreeBSD devel/git-cola
# build from source
cd /usr/ports/devel/git-cola && make clean install
Homebrew is the easiest way to install Git Cola's PyQt5 dependencies. We will use Homebrew to install the git-cola recipe, but build our own .app bundle from source.
Sphinx is used to build the documentation.
brew install sphinx-doc
brew install git-cola
Once brew has installed git-cola you can:
-
Clone the git-cola repositroy
git clone https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola cd git-cola
-
Build the git-cola.app application bundle
make
PYTHON=$(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
rsync -ar --delete git-cola.app/ /Applications/git-cola.app/
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.
If you upgrade using brew then it is recommended that you re-install
Git Colaa's dependencies when upgrading. Re-installing ensures that the
Python modules provided by Homebrew will be properly set up.
A quick fix when upgrading to newer versions of XCode or macOS is to reinstall pyqt5.
brew reinstall pyqt@5
You may also need to relink your pyqt installation:
brew link pyqt@5
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.
If the "brew reinstall" command above does not work then re-installing from scratch using the instructions below should get things back in shape.
# 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
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.
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 @{upstream}
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
environment variable:
export GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR="$HOME/git-cola/bin/git-cola-sequence-editor"
git rebase -i @{upstream}
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, git cola find launches the file finder,
and 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
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.
Commits and pull requests are automatically tested for code quality using GitHub Actions.
Auto-format po/*.po files before committing when updating translations:
$ make po
When submitting patches, consult the contributing guidelines.
Git Cola installs its modules into the default Python site-packages directory
(eg. lib/python3.7/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-packages
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 environment.
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.
Earlier versions of Git Cola may have shipped without vcruntime140.dll and may
not run on machines that are missing this DLL.
To fix this, download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable and install it
Git Cola v4.0.0 and newer include this DLL and do not require this to be installed separately.
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
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
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/.
You may need to configure your history browser if you are upgrading from an older version of Git Cola on Windows.
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 do not need to configure anything.