Blame

A TUI for navigating file blames similar to GitHub's web UI experience.

Screenshot

Motivation

This is a toy project to help me learn Rust while building something I find useful.

Features

• Syntax highlighting of file contents. Auto-detects file type based on the file's extension.
• Easy time travel through the file's blame history. Move through the file's blame history via the parent-child relationship of each line's commit.
• Move through blame contents by line or block. A block is a contiguous group of lines last modified by the same commit.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/izuzak/blame
cd blame
cargo build --release
# the target/release directory contains the "blame" binary now
# you can move it to a directory in your PATH or run it directly

Running

# file - path to a file
# ref - a commit hash, branch, or tag
blame <some/git/repo/filepath> <ref>

# Example: blame the src/main.rs file in the Git repository for the project
blame src/main.rs HEAD

Usage

Keyboard navigation:

• up - move selection to line above.
• down - move selection to line below.
• } - move selection to first line of block above.
• { - move selection to first line of block below.
• left - travel backwards in time: show the blame for the file at the parent of the commit which changed the current line.
• right - travel forwards in time: show the blame for the file and the commit from which we arrived at the current commit.
• q - exit the program.

Dependencies

• clap - Command line argument parsing.
• crossterm and ratatui - Terminal user interface.
• regex - Git blame output parsing.
• syntect and ansi-to-tui - Syntax highlighting.

Ideas for future work

• Write tests.
• Publish the project on crates.io.
• Show stack of commits navigated through to reach current commit.
• Indicator for how recent a line's commit was, e.g. by color or some character.
• Jump to a line by number.
• Jump to a line by searching contents.
• File picker for selecting the file for blame.
• Commit picker for selecting the commit for blame.
• Config file for customizing keybindings, colors, columns, and column widths.
• Show/hide columns and change column widths at runtime.
• Show help screen after pressing ?.
• Loading indicator in case of slow loading in repositories with large histories.
• Open the file, blame or commit in the editor/browser.
• Improve performance:
  • Cache the full file blame so that it doesn't need to be regenerated when re-visiting the same commit.
  • Parse blame info from Git's porcelain blame command, which is intended for machine consumption.
  • Reduce cloning the same information multiple times.
  • Concurrent loading of commit information.

License

MIT license