gsonofnun/gitsmarter

GitSmarter is a Git client for Windows built as a single small program under three megabytes in size, with no other software required to install alongside it. Rather than calling out to the regular git command line tool or an existing Git library the way many similar tools do, it implements Git's internal file formats itself directly in C++, reading and writing loose objects, pack files, the staging index, and branch references on its own. The README reports that cloning the entire Linux kernel source history, a very large repository, takes only about 5 percent longer than using the official git command itself, thanks to techniques like spreading decompression work across many threads at once and mapping files into memory instead of reading them normally. It covers the everyday tasks a Git user needs: browsing a repository's branches and file status, staging and committing changes, viewing diffs with syntax highlighting, walking the commit history as a visual graph, fetching, pushing, and pulling from remote servers, cloning new repositories from the graphical interface or the command line, working with stashes, and creating or switching branches. It also supports signing in to GitHub using the standard device based login flow and storing the resulting access token securely using Windows' built in credential storage, plus a searchable command palette for finding any available action by typing. Building it from source requires Windows, a recent version of Visual Studio's C++ tools, and CMake, after which a single provided build script compiles everything into the finished executable, automatically detecting whether the computer is a regular or ARM based Windows machine. The interface itself is drawn using Direct2D through a custom widget system the author built specifically for this project, rather than reusing an existing user interface toolkit. The README lists some Git features that are not implemented yet, including merging, rebasing, cherry picking, and bisecting, noting that placeholder buttons for some of these already exist in the interface. The project is released under the MIT license.