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🐱 GitCat

Git you can take back.

A cozy, safety-first desktop Git client — Tauri 2 + Rust + Svelte 5. Every mutation snapshots first, so ⌘Z always works.

CI Docs Release License: GPL v3

Website & docs · Download · User guide

GitCat — the commit graph

Why

Every Git GUI makes it easy to run a dangerous command. GitCat is built so you can take it back: a Safety Manager snapshots refs, index, worktree and stash before every mutation, so a global Undo (⌘Z) is always one keystroke away — and Undo is itself undoable.

Features

  • Fast commit graph — git2 reads and a Rust swimlane layout on a virtualized canvas, no depth cap. 150k commits scroll smoothly with the text still readable.
  • Everyday git, made safe — stage by file, hunk or line; commit, stash, branch, tag, checkout; fetch / pull / push; merge, cherry-pick, revert, and rebase (linear plus a drag-to-reorder planner), behind a real 3-way conflict resolver.
  • Diffs that aren't just text — syntax highlighting, plus side-by-side before/after previews for images and PDFs, rendered natively and zoomable.
  • The deep cuts — submodules, patch export/apply, git bisect, git blame with rename-following, per-file history, author and pickaxe search, a git-filter-repo wizard, external diff/merge tools, reflog rescue and dangling-object recovery.
  • ⌘K everything — fuzzy search across commits, refs and actions, vim-style keys, and a real native menu.
  • Plugins (1.1) — ⌘K commands, hooks, side panels, named tools, and Tama skins and reactions.
  • English, 中文 & 한국어 — the whole interface, switchable live with no reload.
  • gitcat . — open a repo from your terminal the way code . does. WSL-aware.

Full list: Features.

Screenshots
Commit detail panel with a syntax-highlighted diff
Commit detail & diff		 The command palette
⌘K command palette
Settings, with the language and graph-layout options
Settings		 The whole UI in Simplified Chinese
Chinese (中文) interface
The whole UI in Korean
Korean (한국어) interface		 The commit graph in the light theme
Light theme

Meet Tama

Tama waving hello Tama curious Tama thinking Tama confident Tama celebrating Tama alarmed Tama shocked Tama napping

Tama is the Safety Manager, not a mascot bolted on for cuteness — she's the one pinning the snapshot. Eight expressions wired to real moments: curious while you search, thinking hard mid-rebase, genuinely alarmed right before something irreversible, celebrating once it's safely done.

Install

Grab an installer from the Releases page — macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel), Windows (x86_64 + arm64) and Linux (x86_64 + arm64; .deb/.rpm/.AppImage), all built from the same tag.

Builds are unsigned for now. macOS: right-click → Open the first time. Windows: More info → Run anyway. Full per-platform steps, including macOS Sequoia, are in the install guide.

gitcat on your PATH

Run Install 'gitcat' command from Settings → Command line (or ⌘K), then open a new terminal:

gitcat .                 # open the repo in the current directory
gitcat ~/src/my-project  # open a repo by path

It writes a launcher to /usr/local/bin (macOS), ~/.local/bin (Linux), or %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps (Windows, plus one inside each WSL distro). The .deb/.rpm packages already put gitcat on PATH.

Development

Needs Rust, Node 22+ and pnpm 10 (corepack enable pnpm if you don't have it — the exact version is pinned in package.json's packageManager). On Linux, Tauri also wants WebKitGTK/GTK3 dev headers; on NixOS, nix develop has everything.

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # launch the app
pnpm demo           # build a rich throwaway repo at ~/gitcat-demo to poke at
Command What it does
pnpm check svelte-check (type-check the frontend)
pnpm test vitest (frontend unit tests)
pnpm test:e2e playwright (real browser, mocked IPC)
pnpm screenshots regenerate docs/public/screenshots/
pnpm docs:dev run the docs site locally
cargo test the Rust suite (from src-tauri/)

See CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a PR.

Tech stack

  • Rust core (src-tauri/) — git2 for reads, the git CLI for writes (every mutation snapshots first), tauri-specta for a typed IPC boundary generated into src/ipc/bindings.ts
  • Frontend — Svelte 5 islands (one per feature) over a hand-tuned vanilla canvas for the graph itself
  • CI/CD — cargo test + pnpm test on every push, a 6-platform release matrix on tags, and a VitePress site auto-deployed to GitHub Pages

License

Free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. Copyright © 2026 Jiucheng Zang.