Git Cola Documentation

git-cola(1)

SYNOPSIS

git cola [options] [sub-command]

DESCRIPTION

git cola is a sleek and powerful Git GUI.

OPTIONS

–amend

Start git cola in amend mode.

–prompt

Prompt for a Git repository. Defaults to the current directory.

-r, –repo <path>

Open the Git repository at <path>. Defaults to the current directory.

-s, –status-filter <filter>

Apply the path filter to the status widget.

–version

Print the git cola version and exit.

-h, –help

Show usage and optional arguments.

–help-commands

Show available sub-commands.

SUB-COMMANDS

am

Apply patches.

archive

Export tarballs from Git.

branch

Create branches.

browse

Browse tracked files.

config

Configure settings.

dag

Start the git dag Git history browser.

diff

Diff changed files.

fetch

Fetch history from remote repositories.

grep

Use git grep to search for content.

merge

Merge branches.

pull

Fetch and merge remote branches.

push

Push branches to remotes.

rebase

Start an interactive rebase.

remote

Create and edit remotes.

stash

Stash uncommitted modifications.

tag

Create tags.

version

Print the git cola version.

CONFIGURE YOUR EDITOR

The editor used by Ctrl-e is configured from the Preferences screen. The environment variable $VISUAL is consulted when no editor has been configured.

ProTip: Configuring your editor to gvim -f -p will open multiple tabs when editing files. gvim -f -o uses splits.

git cola is {vim, emacs, textpad, notepad++}-aware. When you select a line in the grep screen and press any of Enter, Ctrl-e, or the Edit button, you are taken to that exact line.

The editor preference is saved in the gui.editor variable using git config.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

git cola has many useful keyboard shortcuts.

You can see the available shortcuts by pressing the ? key, choosing Help -> Keyboard shortcuts from the main menu, or by consulting the git cola keyboard shortcuts reference.

TOOLS

The git cola interface is composed of various cooperating tools. Double-clicking a tool opens it in its own subwindow. Dragging it around moves and places it within the window.

Tools can be hidden and rearranged however you like. git cola carefully remembers your window layout and restores it the next time it is launched.

The Control-{1, 2, 3, …} hotkey gives focus to a specific tool. A hidden tool can be re-opened using the Tools menu or the Shift+Control-{1, 2, 3, …} shortcut keys.

The Diff editor can be focused with Ctrl-j. the Status tool can be focused with Ctrl-k. the Commit tool can be focused with Ctrl-l.

STATUS

The Status tool provides a visual analog to the git status command.

Status displays files that are modified relative to the staging area, staged for the next commit, unmerged files from an in-progress merge, and files that are untracked to git.

These are the same categories one sees when running git status on the command line.

You can navigate through the list of files using keyboard arrows as well as the ergonomical and vim-like j and k shortcut keys.

There are several convenient ways to interact with files in the Status tool.

Selecting a file displays its diff in the DIFF viewer. Double-clicking a file stages its contents, as does the the Ctrl-s shortcut key.

Ctrl-e opens selected files in the conifgured editor, and Ctrl-d opens selected files using git difftool

Additional actions can be performed using the right-click context menu.

Actions

Clicking the Staged folder shows a diffstat for the index.

Clicking the Modified folder shows a diffstat for the worktree.

Clicking individual files sends diffs to the Diff Display.

Double-clicking individual files adds and removes their content from the index.

Various actions are available through the right-click context menu. Different actions are available depending a file’s status.

Stage Selected

Add to the staging area using git add Marks unmerged files as resolved.

Launch Editor

Launches the configured visual text editor

Launch Difftool

Visualize changes using git difftool.

Revert Unstaged Edits

Reverts unstaged content by checking out selected paths from the index/staging area

Revert Uncommitted Edits

Throws away uncommitted edits

Unstage Selected

Remove from the index/staging area with git reset

Launch Merge Tool

Resolve conflicts using git mergetool.

Delete File(s)

Delete untracked files from the filesystem.

Add to .gitignore

Adds untracked files to to the .gitignore file.

DIFF

The diff viewer/editor displays diffs for selected files. Additions are shown in green and removals are displayed in light red. Extraneous whitespace is shown with a pure-red background.

Right-clicking in the diff provides access to additional actions that use either the cursor location or text selection.

Staging content for commit

The @@ patterns denote a new diff hunk. Selecting lines of diff and using the Stage Selected Lines command will stage just the selected lines. Clicking within a diff hunk and selecting Stage Diff Hunk stages the entire patch diff hunk.

The corresponding opposite commands can be performed on staged files as well, e.g. staged content can be selectively removed from the index when we are viewing diffs for staged content.

COMMIT MESSAGE EDITOR

The commit message editor is a simple text widget for entering commit messages.

You can navigate between the Subject and Extended description… fields using the keyboard arrow keys.

Pressing enter when inside the Subject field jumps down to the extended description field.

The Options button menu to the left of the subject field provides access to the additional actions.

The Ctrl+i keyboard shortcut adds a standard “Signed-off-by: ” line, and Ctrl+Enter creates a new commit using the commit message and staged content.

Sign Off

The Sign Off button adds a standard:

Signed-off-by: A. U. Thor <a.u.thor@example.com>

line to the bottom of the commit message.

Invoking this action is equivalent to passing the -s option to git commit.

Commit

The commit button runs git commit. The contents of the commit message editor is provided as the commit message.

Only staged files are included in the commit – this is the same behavior as running git commit on the command-line.

Line and Column Display

The current line and column number is displayed by the editor. E.g. a 5,0 display means that the cursor is located at line five, column zero.

The display changes colors when lines get too long. Yellow indicates the safe boundary for sending patches to a mailing list while keeping space for inline reply markers.

Orange indicates that the line is starting to run a bit long and should break soon.

Red indicates that the line is running up against the standard 80-column limit for commit messages.

Keeping commit messages less than 76-characters wide is encouraged. git log is a great tool but long lines mess up its formatting for everyone else, so please be mindful when writing commit messages.

Amend Last Commit

Clicking on Amend Last Commit makes git cola amend the previous commit instead of creating a new one. git cola loads the previous commit message into the commit message editor when this option is selected.

The Status tool will display all of the changes for the amended commit.

Create Signed Commit

Tell git commit and git merge to sign commits using GPG.

Using this option is equivalent to passing the --gpg-sign option to git commit and git merge.

This option’s default value can be configured using the cola.signcommits configuration variable.

Prepare Commit Message

The Commit -> Prepare Commit Message action or Ctrl-Shift-Return keyboard shortcut runs the cola-prepare-commit-msg hook if it is available in .git/hooks/. This is a git cola-specific hook that takes the same parameters as Git’s prepare-commit-msg hook

The hook is passed the path to .git/GIT_COLA_MSG as the first argument and the hook is expected to write an updated commit message to specified path. After running this action, the commit message editor is updated with the new commit message.

To override the default path to this hook set the cola.prepareCommitMessageHook git config variable to the path to the hook script. This is useful if you would like to use a common hook across all repositories.

BRANCHES

The Branches tool provides a visual tree to navigate through the branches. The tree has three main nodes Local Branch, Remote Branch and Tags. Branches are grouped by their name divided by the character ‘/’.Ex:

branch/feature/foo
branch/feature/bar
branch/doe

Will produce:

branch
    - doe
    + feature
        - bar
        - foo

Current branch will display a star icon. If current branch has commits ahead/behind it will display an up/down arrow with it’s number.

Actions

Various actions are available through the right-click context menu. Different actions are available depending of selected branch status.

Checkout

The checkout action runs git checkout [<branchname>].

Merge in current branch

The merge action runs git merge –no-commit [<branchname>].

Push

The push action runs git push [<remote>] [<branchname>].

Rename Branch

The rename branch action runs git branch -M [<branchname>].

Delete Branch

The delete branch branch action runs git branch -D [<branchname>].

Delete Remote Branch

The remote branch action runs git push –delete [<remote>] [<branchname>].

APPLY PATCHES

Use the File -> Apply Patches menu item to begin applying patches.

Dragging and dropping patches onto the git cola interface adds the patches to the list of patches to apply using git am.

You can drag either a set of patches or a directory containing patches. Patches can be sorted using in the interface and are applied in the same order as is listed in the list.

When a directory is dropped git cola walks the directory tree in search of patches. git cola sorts the list of patches after they have all been found. This allows you to control the order in which patchs are applied by placing patchsets into alphanumerically-sorted directories.

CUSTOM WINDOW SETTINGS

git cola remembers modifications to the layout and arrangement of tools within the git cola interface. Changes are saved and restored at application shutdown/startup.

git cola can be configured to not save custom layouts by unsetting the Save Window Settings option in the git cola preferences.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

These variables can be set using git config or from the settings.

cola.blameviewer

The command used to blame files. Defaults to git gui blame.

cola.browserdockable

Whether to create a dock widget with the Browser tool. Defaults to false to speedup startup time.

cola.checkconflicts

Inspect unmerged files for conflict markers before staging them. This feature helps prevent accidental staging of unresolved merge conflicts. Defaults to true.

cola.defaultrepo

git cola, when run outside of a Git repository, prompts the user for a repository. Set cola.defaultrepo to the path of a Git repository to make git cola attempt to use that repository before falling back to prompting the user for a repository.

cola.dictionary

Specifies an additional dictionary for git cola to use in its spell checker. This should be configured to the path of a newline-separated list of words.

cola.expandtab

Expand tabs into spaces in the commit message editor. When set to true, git cola will insert a configurable number of spaces when tab is pressed. The number of spaces is determined by cola.tabwidth. Defaults to false.

cola.fileattributes

Enables per-file gitattributes encoding support when set to true. This tells git cola to honor the configured encoding when displaying and applying diffs.

cola.fontdiff

Specifies the font to use for git cola’s diff display.

cola.icontheme

Specifies the icon themes to use throughout git cola. The theme specified must be the name of the subdirectory containing the icons, which in turn must be placed in the inside the main “icons” directory in git cola’s installation prefix.

If unset, or set either “light” or “default”, then the default style will be used. If set to “dark” then the built-in “dark” icon theme, which is suitable for a dark window manager theme, will be used.

If set to an absolute directory path then icons in that directory will be used. This value can be set to multiple values using, git config –add cola.icontheme $theme.

This setting can be overridden by the GIT_COLA_ICON_THEME environment variable, which can specify multiple themes using a colon-separated value.

The icon theme can also be specified by passing –icon-theme=<theme> on the command line, once for each icon theme, in the order that they should be searched. This can be used to override a subset of the icons, and fallback to the built-in icons for the remainder.

cola.inotify

Set to false to disable file system change monitoring. Defaults to true, but also requires either Linux with inotify support or Windows with pywin32 installed for file system change monitoring to actually function.

cola.refreshonfocus

Set to true to automatically refresh when git cola gains focus. Defaults to false because this can cause a pause whenever switching to git cola from another application.

cola.linebreak

Whether to automatically break long lines while editing commit messages. Defaults to true. This setting is configured using the Preferences dialog, but it can be toggled for one-off usage using the commit message editor’s options sub-menu.

cola.maxrecent

git cola caps the number of recent repositories to avoid cluttering the start and recent repositories menu. The maximum number of repositories to remember is controlled by cola.maxrecent and defaults to 8.

cola.dragencoding

git cola encodes paths dragged from its widgets into utf-16 when adding them to the drag-and-drop mime data (specifically, the text/x-moz-url entry). utf-16 is used to make gnome-terminal see the right paths, but other terminals may expect a different encoding. If you are using a terminal that expects a modern encoding, e.g. terminator, then set this value to utf-8.

cola.readsize

git cola avoids reading large binary untracked files. The maximum size to read is controlled by cola.readsize and defaults to 2048.

cola.safemode

The “Stage” button in the git cola Actions panel stages all files when it is activated and no files are selected. This can be problematic if it is accidentally triggered after carefully preparing the index with staged changes. “Safe Mode” is enabled by setting cola.safemode to true. When enabled, git cola will do nothing when “Stage” is activated without a selection. Defaults to false.

cola.savewindowsettings

git cola will remember its window settings when set to true. Window settings and X11 sessions are saved in $HOME/.config/git-cola.

cola.showpath

git cola displays the absolute path of the repository in the window title. This can be disabled by setting cola.showpath to false. Defaults to true.

cola.signcommits

git cola will sign commits by default when set true. Defaults to false. See the section below on setting up GPG for more details.

cola.tabwidth

The number of columns occupied by a tab character. Defaults to 8.

cola.terminal

The command to use when launching commands within a graphical terminal.

cola.terminal defaults to xterm -e when unset. e.g. when opening a shell, git cola will run xterm -e $SHELL.

If either gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, or konsole are installed then they will be preferred over xterm when cola.terminal is unset.

cola.textwidth

The number of columns used for line wrapping. Tabs are counted according to cola.tabwidth.

cola.turbo

Set to true to enables “turbo” mode. “Turbo” mode disables some features that can slow things down when operating on huge repositories. “Turbo” mode will skip loading Git commit messages, author details, status information, and commit date details in the File Browser tool. Defaults to false.

cola.color.text

The default diff text color, in hexadecimal #RRGGBB notation. Defaults to “#030303”.

cola.color.add

The default diff “add” background color, in hexadecimal #RRGGBB notation. Defaults to “#d2ffe4”.

cola.color.remove

The default diff “remove” background color, in hexadecimal #RRGGBB notation. Defaults to “#fee0e4”.

cola.color.header

The default diff header text color, in hexadecimal #RRGGBB notation. Defaults to “#bbbbbb”.

gui.diffcontext

The number of diff context lines to display.

gui.displayuntracked

git cola avoids showing untracked files when set to false.

gui.editor

The default text editor to use is defined in gui.editor. The config variable overrides the VISUAL environment variable. e.g. gvim -f -p.

gui.historybrowser

The history browser to use when visualizing history. Defaults to gitk.

diff.tool

The default diff tool to use.

merge.tool

The default merge tool to use.

user.email

Your email address to be recorded in any newly created commits. Can be overridden by the ‘GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL’, ‘GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL’, and ‘EMAIL’ environment variables.

user.name

Your full name to be recorded in any newly created commits. Can be overridden by the ‘GIT_AUTHOR_NAME’ and ‘GIT_COMMITTER_NAME’ environment variables.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

GIT_COLA_ICON_THEME

When set in the environment, GIT_COLA_ICON_THEME overrides the theme specified in the cola.icontheme configuration. Read the section on cola.icontheme above for more details.

GIT_COLA_SCALE

git cola can be made to scale its interface for HiDPI displays. When defined, git cola will scale icons, radioboxes, and checkboxes according to the scale factor. The default value is 1. A good value is 2 for high-resolution displays.

Fonts are not scaled, as their size can already be set in the settings.

GIT_COLA_TRACE

When defined, git cola logs git commands to stdout. When set to full, git cola also logs the exit status and output. When set to trace, git cola logs to the Console widget.

VISUAL

Specifies the default editor to use. This is ignored when the gui.editor configuration variable is defined.

LANGUAGE SETTINGS

git cola automatically detects your language and presents some translations when available. This may not be desired, or you may want git cola to use a specific language.

You can make git cola use an alternative language by creating a ~/.config/git-cola/language file containing the standard two-letter gettext language code, e.g. “en”, “de”, “ja”, “zh”, etc.:

mkdir -p ~/.config/git-cola &&
echo en >~/.config/git-cola/language

Alternatively you may also use LANGUAGE environmental variable to temporarily change git cola’s language just like any other gettext-based program. For example to temporarily change git cola’s language to English:

LANGUAGE=en git cola

To make git cola use the zh_TW translation with zh_HK, zh, and en as a fallback.:

LANGUAGE=zh_TW:zh_HK:zh:en git cola

CUSTOM GUI ACTIONS

git cola allows you to define custom GUI actions by setting git config variables. The “name” of the command appears in the “Actions” menu.

guitool.<name>.cmd

Specifies the shell command line to execute when the corresponding item of the Tools menu is invoked. This option is mandatory for every tool. The command is executed from the root of the working directory, and in the environment it receives the name of the tool as GIT_GUITOOL, the name of the currently selected file as FILENAME, and the name of the current branch as CUR_BRANCH (if the head is detached, CUR_BRANCH is empty).

guitool.<name>.background

Run the command in the background (similar to editing and difftool actions). This avoids blocking the GUI. Setting background to true implies noconsole and norescan.

guitool.<name>.needsfile

Run the tool only if a diff is selected in the GUI. It guarantees that FILENAME is not empty.

guitool.<name>.noconsole

Run the command silently, without creating a window to display its output.

guitool.<name>.norescan

Don’t rescan the working directory for changes after the tool finishes execution.

guitool.<name>.confirm

Show a confirmation dialog before actually running the tool.

guitool.<name>.argprompt

Request a string argument from the user, and pass it to the tool through the ARGS environment variable. Since requesting an argument implies confirmation, the confirm option has no effect if this is enabled. If the option is set to true, yes, or 1, the dialog uses a built-in generic prompt; otherwise the exact value of the variable is used.

guitool.<name>.revprompt

Request a single valid revision from the user, and set the REVISION environment variable. In other aspects this option is similar to argprompt, and can be used together with it.

guitool.<name>.revunmerged

Show only unmerged branches in the revprompt subdialog. This is useful for tools similar to merge or rebase, but not for things like checkout or reset.

guitool.<name>.title

Specifies the title to use for the prompt dialog. Defaults to the tool name.

guitool.<name>.prompt

Specifies the general prompt string to display at the top of the dialog, before subsections for argprompt and revprompt. The default value includes the actual command.

guitool.<name>.shortcut

Specifies a keyboard shortcut for the custom tool.

The value must be a valid string understood by the QAction::setShortcut() API. See http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qkeysequence.html#QKeySequence-2 for more details about the supported values.

Avoid creating shortcuts that conflict with existing built-in git cola shortcuts. Creating a conflict will result in no action when the shortcut is used.

SETTING UP GPG FOR SIGNED COMMITS

When creating signed commits gpg will attempt to read your password from the terminal from which git cola was launched. The way to make this work smoothly is to use a GPG agent so that you can avoid needing to re-enter your password every time you commit.

This also gets you a graphical passphrase prompt instead of getting prompted for your password in the terminal.

Install gpg-agent and friends

On Mac OS X, you may need to brew install gpg-agent and install the Mac GPG Suite.

On Linux use your package manager to install gnupg2, gnupg-agent and pinentry-qt, e.g.:

sudo apt-get install gnupg2 gnupg-agent pinentry-qt

On Linux, you should also configure Git so that it uses gpg2 (gnupg2), otherwise you will get errors mentioning, “unable to open /dev/tty”. Set Git’s gpg.program to gpg2:

git config --global gpg.program gpg2

Configure gpg-agent and a pin-entry program

On Mac OS X, edit ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf to include the line,:

use-agent

This is typically not needed on Linux, where gpg2 is used, as this is the default value when using gpg2.

Next, edit ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf to contain a pinentry-program line pointing to the pinentry program for your platform.

The following example ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf shows how to use pinentry-gtk-2 on Linux:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2
default-cache-ttl 3600

This following example .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf shows how to use MacGPG2’s pinentry app on On Mac OS X:

pinentry-program /usr/local/MacGPG2/libexec/pinentry-mac.app/Contents/MacOS/pinentry-mac
default-cache-ttl 3600
enable-ssh-support
use-standard-socket

Once this has been setup then you will need to reload your gpg-agent config.:

echo RELOADAGENT | gpg-connect-agent

If you see the following output:

OK

Then the daemon is already running, and you do not need to start it yourself.

If it is not running, eval the output of gpg-agent –daemon in your shell prior to launching git cola.:

eval $(gpg-agent --daemon)
git cola

WINDOWS NOTES

Git Installation

If Git is installed in a custom location, e.g. not installed in C:/Git or Program Files, then the path to Git must be configured by creating a file in your home directory ~/.config/git-cola/git-bindir that points to your git installation. e.g.:

C:/Tools/Git/bin

git-dag(1)

SYNOPSIS

git dag [options] [<since>..<until>] [[–] [<path>…]]

DESCRIPTION

git-dag is a powerful Git history visualizer. git-dag presents powerful git log features in a simple-to-use graphical interface.

OPTIONS

–prompt

Prompt for a Git repository instead of using the current directory.

-r, –repo <path>

Run git dag on the git repository in <path>. Defaults to the current directory.

–version

Print the git dag version and exit.

-h, –help

Show usage and optional arguments.

Log Options

The Log prompt allows you to pass arguments to git log. This can be used to filter the displayed history, for example entering master – Makefile will display only commits on the master branch that touch the Makefile.

CONTEXT-MENU ACTIONS

The right-click menu can be used to perform various actions. All actions operate on the selected commit.

You can create branches and tags, cherry-pick commits, save patches, export tarballs, and grab files from older commits using the context menu.

DIFF COMMITS

You can diff arbitrary commits. Select a single commit in either the list view or the graph view and then right-click on a second commit.

A menu will appear allowing you to diff the two commits.

SHORTCUTS

You can run commands using dedicated shortcuts. Select a single commit and then press Ctrl-Alt-c to copy sha1 or Ctrl-d to run diff tool.

You can read more about hotkeys from ‘keyboard shortcuts’ window or context menu.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

log.date

Set the default date-time format for the ‘Date’ field. Setting a value for log.date is similar to using git log’s –date option. Possible values are relative, local, default, iso, rfc, and short; see git-log(1) for details.

Thanks

git-cola was made possible thanks to the contributions of the following people:

  • Aaron Cook
  • Aaron Wolf
  • Adam Lesperance
  • Adrien be
  • AJ Bagwell
  • Alex Chernetz
  • Alex Gulyás
  • Alexander Kozienko
  • Alf Eaton
  • anderben
  • Andreas Schnederle-Wagner
  • Andreas Sommer
  • Andrew Chen
  • Andrej Kvasnica
  • Audrius Karabanovas
  • balping
  • Barış ÇELİK
  • Barry Roberts
  • Boris W
  • Ben Boeckel
  • Ben Cole
  • Benedict Lee
  • Benoît Nouyrigat
  • Bert Jacobs
  • birgersp
  • 林博仁 (Buo-ren Lin)
  • Charles 101
  • Christian Jann
  • Christopher Meng
  • Clément Pit–Claudel
  • Constantine Grantcharov
  • Daniel Fahlke
  • Daniel Jay Haskin
  • Daniel Harding
  • Daniel King
  • Dave Thomas
  • David Aguilar
  • David LeGare
  • David Martínez Martí
  • Dawid Drozd
  • Dennis Gilmore
  • deniz1a
  • Dmitry Kann
  • Dmitry Pashkevich
  • Doug Hoskisson
  • Drugoy
  • Efimov Vasily
  • Eric Drechsel
  • Erwan Bousse
  • Fabio Coatti
  • Filip Danilović
  • fu7mu4
  • Garoe Dorta
  • Geoffrey van Wyk
  • geotavros
  • Git Hackers
  • green-eyed-bear
  • Glen Mailer
  • Guillaume de Bure
  • Guo Yunhe
  • Harro Verton
  • Hannes @kannes
  • Igor Galarraga
  • Igor Kopach
  • Ilya Tumaykin
  • Ingo Weinhold
  • Ismael Juma
  • Iulian Udrea
  • Ivar Smolin
  • Jan @hanksoff
  • Jan Šilhan
  • Jan Tumanov
  • jakubklos77
  • Jakub Szymański
  • Jakub Wilk
  • James Geiger
  • Javier Rodriguez Cuevas
  • Jeff Dagenais
  • Jérôme Carretero
  • jfessard
  • JiCiT
  • Jimmy M. Coleman
  • Johannes Löhnert
  • Johann Schmitz
  • Jordan Bedwell
  • Josh Noe
  • Josh Taylor
  • Justin Lecher
  • Kai Krakow
  • Karl Bielefeldt
  • Karthik Manamcheri
  • Kelvie Wong
  • Kerrick Staley
  • Kevin Kofler
  • Kirit Sælensminde
  • Kyle Slane
  • László Böszörményi
  • Leho Kraav
  • Lev Zlotin
  • Louis Rousseau
  • Libor Jelinek
  • Liviu Cristian Mirea-Ghiban
  • Luca Ottaviano
  • Łukasz Wojniłowicz
  • Luke Bakken
  • Maarten Nieber
  • Maaaks
  • Maciej Filipiak
  • Mahmoud Hossam
  • Mateusz Kedzior
  • Maicon D. Filippsen
  • Marcin Mielniczuk
  • Marco Costalba
  • Markus Heidelberg
  • Martin Konecny
  • Matěj Šmíd
  • Matthew Levine
  • Matthias Mailänder
  • Micha Rosenbaum
  • Michael Geddes
  • Michael Homer
  • Mickael Albertus
  • Mike Hanson
  • MikHulk
  • Minarto Margoliono
  • Mosaab Alzoubi
  • Myz
  • Naraesk
  • Nick Todd
  • Nicolas Dietrich
  • Nikos Roussos
  • Noel Grandin
  • ochristi
  • Oliver Haessler
  • OmegaPhil (Omega Weapon)
  • Owen Healy
  • Pamela Strucker
  • Paolo G. Giarrusso
  • Parashurama Rhagdamaziel
  • Patrick Browne
  • Paul Hildebrandt
  • Paul Weingardt
  • Paulo Fidalgo
  • Pavel Borecki
  • Pavel Rehak
  • Peter Dave Hello
  • Peter Júnoš
  • Petr Gladkikh
  • Philip Stark
  • Pilar Molina Lopez
  • Radek Novacek
  • Radek Postołowicz
  • Rafael Nascimento
  • Raghavendra Karunanidhi
  • Rainer Müller
  • Robbert Korving
  • Rolando Espinoza La fuente
  • Rustam Safin
  • Samsul Ma’arif
  • Sebastian Brass
  • Sergey Leschina
  • Srinivasa Nallapati
  • Stan Angeloff
  • Stanisław Halik
  • Stefan Naewe
  • Steffen Prohaska
  • Sven Claussner
  • Szymon Judasz
  • Taylor Braun-Jones
  • Thiemo van Engelen
  • Thomas Kiley
  • Thomas Kluyver
  • Tim Schumacher
  • Trevor Alexander
  • Ugo Riboni
  • Uri Okrent
  • Utku Karatas
  • Ｖ字龍 (Vdragon)
  • Vaibhav Sagar
  • Vaiz
  • Ved Vyas
  • Victorhck
  • Ville Skyttä
  • Virgil Dupras
  • Vitor Lobo
  • v.paritskiy
  • Wolfgang Ocker
  • wsdfhjxc
  • Xie Hua Liang (xieofxie)
  • Yi EungJun
  • Zauber Paracelsus
  • Zeioth
  • Zhang Han

Release Notes

Releases

Latest Release

v3.2 is the latest stable release.

Development version

Clone the git-cola repo to get the latest development version:

git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git

git-cola v3.2

Usability, bells and whistles
Packaging
Fixes
Development

git-cola v3.1

Usability, bells and whistles
Packaging

  • The vendored qtpy library was updated to v1.3.1.

  • The macOS installation was made simpler for better compatibility with Homebrew.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/636

  • The Windows installer is now much simpler. Git Cola now bundles Python and PyQt5, so users need only install the “Git for Windows” and “Git Cola” installers to get things working.

Fixes

git-cola v3.0

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.11

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

  • git cola’s spellchecker now supports the new dict-common filesystem layout, and prefers the /usr/share/dict/cracklib-small file over the /usr/share/dict/words provided on older distributions. This makes the spellchecker compatible with Arch, which does not provide a words symlink like Debian.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/663

  • Properly handle the case where an existing file is untracked using the File Browser.

  • Fix a quirk where the “Create Branch” dialog sometimes required clicking twice on the radio buttons.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/662

  • Fixed a focus issue to ensure that “Push”, “Fetch”, and “Pull” can be executed with the press of a single enter key after being shown.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/661

  • Committing is now allowed in when resolving a merge results in no changes. This state was previously prevented by the commit message editor, which prevented users from resolving merges that result in no changes.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/679

  • The filesystem monitor would sometimes emit backtraces when directories are modified. This has been fixed.

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1438522

  • Absolute paths are now returned when querying for .git-relative paths from within a submodule, which uses .git-files. This fixes launching git cola from within a subdirectory of a submodule.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/675

git-cola v2.10

Usability, bells and whistles

  • git cola can now invoke the .git/hooks/cola-prepare-commit-msg hook to update the commit message. This hook takes the same parameters as Git’s prepare-commit-message hook. The default path to this hook can be overridden by setting the cola.prepareCommitMessageHook configuration variable.

    http://git-cola.readthedocs.io/en/latest/git-cola.html#prepare-commit-message

  • git cola diff (and the corresponding Diff menu actions) can now launch difftool with the standard Ctrl+D hotkey. The Ctrl+E hotkey was also added for launching an editor.

  • Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) translation updates.

Fixes
Packaging

git-cola v2.9.1

Fixes

git-cola v2.9

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes
Development

git-cola v2.8

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.7

Fixes
Development
Packaging

  • git cola is now compatible with PyQt5, PyQt4, and Pyside. git cola previously supported PyQt4 only, but will now use whichever library is available. Users are not required to upgrade at this time, but PyQt5 support can be enabled anytime by making its python modules available.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/232

    NOTE: We do not yet recommend using PyQt5 because there are known exit-on-segfault bugs in Qt5 that have not yet been addressed. git cola is sensitive to this bug and is known to crash on exit when using git dag or the interactive rebase feature on PyQt5.

    https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-52988

    PyQt4 is stable and there are no known issues when using it so we recommend using it until the Qt5 bugs have been resolved.

  • git cola now depends on QtPy and includes a bundled copy of the qtpy library. If you are packaging git cola and would prefer to use qtpy from your distribution instead of the built-in version then use make NO_VENDOR_LIBS=1 when building git cola. This will prevent vendored libraries from being installed.

git-cola v2.6

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes
Packaging

  • It is now possible to install git cola to and from utf8-encoded filesystem paths. Previously, Python’s stdlib would throw an encoding error during installation. We workaround the stdlib by forcing python2 to use utf-8, thus fixing assumptions in the stdlib library code.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/551

git-cola v2.5

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.4

Usability, bells and whistles

  • The user interface is now HiDPI-capable. git-cola now uses SVG icons, and its interface can be scaled by setting the GIT_COLA_SCALE environment variable.

  • git dag now supports the standard editor, difftool, and history hotkeys. It is now possible to invoke these actions from file widget’s context menu and through the standard hotkeys.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/473

  • The Status tool also learned about the history hotkey. Additionally, the Alt-{j,k} aliases are also supported in the Status tool for consistency with the other tools where the non-Alt hotkeys are not available.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/488

  • The File Browser tool now has better default column sizes, and remembers its window size and placement.

  • The File Browser now supports the refresh hotkey, and has better behavior when refreshing. The selection is now retained, and new and removed files are found when refreshing.

  • A new git-cola-completion.bash completion script is provided in the contrib/ directory. It must be used alongside Git’s completion script. Source it from your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc, etc) after sourcing the git-completion.bash script and you will have command-line completion support for the git cola and git dag sub-commands.

  • The “checkout” dialog now offers completion for remote branches and other git refs. This makes it easier to checkout remote branches in a detached head state. Additionally, the checkout dialog also offers completion for remote branches that have not yet been checked out, which makes it easier to create a local tracking branch by just completing for that potential name.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/390

  • The “create branch” and “create tag” dialogs now save and restore their window settings.

  • The “status” widget can now be configured to use a bold font with a darker background for the header items.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/506

  • The “status” widget now remembers its horizontol scrollbar position across updates. This is helpful when working on projects with long paths.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/494

Fixes
Packaging

git-cola v2.3

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.2.1

Fixes
  • Fixed the “Sign off” feature in the commit message editor.

git-cola v2.2

Usability, bells and whistles

  • Double-click will now choose a commit in the “Select commit” dialog.

  • git cola has a feature that reads .git/MERGE_MSG and friends for the commit message when a merge is in-progress. Upon refresh, git cola will now detect when a merge has completed and reset the commit message back to its previous state. It is only reset if the editor contains a message that was read from the file and has not been manually edited by the user.

  • The commit message editor’s context menu now has a “Clear…” action for clearing the message across both the summary and description fields.

  • Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) translation updates.

  • The system theme’s icons are now used wherever possible.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/458

Fixes

  • The stash viewer now uses git show --no-ext-diff to avoid running user-configured diff tools.

  • git cola now uses the setsid() system call to ensure that the GIT_ASKPASS and SSH_ASKPASS helper programs are used when pushing changes using git. The askpass helpers will now be used even when git cola is launched from a terminal.

    The behavior without setsid() is that git cola can appear to hang while pushing changes. The hang happens when git prompts the user for a password using the terminal, but the user never sees the prompt. setsid() detaches the terminal, which ensures that the askpass helpers are used.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/218

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/262

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/377

  • git dag’s file list tool was updated to properly handle unicode paths.

  • gnome-terminal is no longer used by default when cola.terminal is unset. It is broken, as was detailed in #456.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/456

  • The interactive rebase feature was not always setting $GIT_EDITOR to the value of gui.editor, thus there could be instances where rebase will seem to not stop, or hang, when performing “reword” actions.

    We now set the $GIT_EDITOR environment variable when performing the “Continue”, “Skip”, and “Edit Todo” rebase actions so that the correct editor is used during the rebase.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/445

Packaging
  • git cola moved from a 3-part version number to a simpler 2-part “vX.Y” version number. Most of our releases tend to contain new features.

git-cola v2.1.2

Usability, bells and whistles

  • Updated zh_TW translations.

  • git cola rebase now defaults to @{upstream}, and generally uses the same CLI syntax as git rebase.

  • The commit message editor now allows you to bypass commit hooks by selecting the “Bypass Commit Hooks” option. This is equivalent to passing the –no-verify option to git commit.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/357

  • We now prevent the “Delete Files” action from creating a dialog that does not fit on screen.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/378

  • git xbase learned to edit rebase instruction sheets that contain exec commands.

  • The diff colors are now configurable. cola.color.{text,add,remove,header} can now be set with 6-digit hexadecimal colors. See the git cola manual <https://git-cola.readthedocs.io/en/latest/git-cola.html#configuration-variables>_ for more details.

  • Improved hotkey documentation.

Fixes

git-cola v2.1.1

Usability, bells and whistles
  • A new “Find files” widget was added, and can be activated by using the Ctrl+t or t hotkeys.
  • A new git cola find sub-command was added for finding files.
  • git cola now remembers the text cursor’s position when staging interactively with the keyboard. This makes it easier to use the keyboard arrows to select and stage lines.
  • The completion widgets will now select the top completion item when Enter or Return are pressed.
  • You can now refresh using F5 in addition to the existing Ctrl+R hotkey.
Fixes
  • git cola now passes –no-abbrev-commit to git log to override having log.abbrevCommit = true set in .gitconfig.

git-cola v2.1.0

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.0.8

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes
Packaging

  • The git-cola-folder-handler.desktop file handler was fixed to pass validation by desktop-file-validate.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/356

  • The git.svg icon was renamed to git-cola.svg, and git cola was taught to prefer icons from the desktop theme when available.

git-cola v2.0.7

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

  • We now use git config to parse the list of remotes instead of parsing the output of git remote, which is a Git porcelain and should not be used by scripts.

  • Avoid “C++ object has been deleted” errors from PyQt4.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/346

Packaging
  • The make install target now uses install instead of cp.

git-cola v2.0.6

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.0.5

Usability, bells and whistles

  • New Brazillian Portuguese translation thanks to Vitor Lobo.

  • New Indonesian translation thanks to Samsul Ma’arif.

  • Updated Simplified Chinese translation thanks to Zhang Han.

  • Ctrl+Backspace is now a hotkey for “delete untracked files” in the status widget.

  • Fetch/Push/Pull dialogs now use the configured remote of the current branch by default.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/pull/324

Fixes

git-cola v2.0.4

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.0.3

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.0.2

Usability, bells and whistles
Packaging
  • Building the documentation no longer requires asciidoc. We now use Sphinx for building html documentation and man pages.
Fixes
Packaging
  • git-cola no longer depends on Asciidoc for building its documentation and man-pages. We now depend on [Sphinx](http://sphinx-doc.org/) only.

git-cola v2.0.1

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v2.0.0

Portability
Fixes

git-cola v1.9.4

Usability, bells and whistles

  • The new Bookmarks tool makes it really easy to switch between repositories.

  • There is now a dedicated dialog for applying patches. See the File -> Apply Patches menu item.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/215

  • A new git cola am sub-command was added for applying patches.

Fixes

git-cola v1.9.3

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v1.9.2

Fixes
Packaging

  • Most of the git-cola sub-packages have been removed. The only remaining packages are cola, cola.models, and cola.widgets.

  • The translation file for Simplified Chinese was renamed to zh_CN.po.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/209

git-cola v1.9.1

Packaging
  • git cola version –brief now prints the brief version number.
Fixes
  • Resurrected the “make dist” target, for those that prefer to create their own tarballs.
  • Fixed the typo that broke the preferences dialog.

git-cola v1.9.0

Usability, bells and whistles

  • We now ship a full-featured interactive git rebase editor. The rebase todo file is edited using the git xbase script which is provided at $prefix/share/git-cola/bin/git-xbase. This script can be used standalone by setting the $GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR before running git rebase –interactive.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/1

  • Fixup commit messages can now be loaded from the commit message editor.

  • Tool widgets can be locked in place by using the “Tools/Lock Layout” menu action.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/202

  • You can now push to several remotes simultaneously by selecting multiple remotes in the “Push” dialog.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/148

  • The grep tool learned to search using three different modes: basic regular expressions (default), extended regular expressions, and fixed strings.

Packaging
  • git cola now depends on the argparse Python module. This module is part of the stdlib in Python 2.7 and must be installed separately when using Python 2.6 and below.
Fixes
  • Support unicode in the output from fetch, push, and pull.

git-cola v1.8.5

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v1.8.4

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Brand new German translation thanks to Sven Claussner.
  • The “File” menu now provides a “New Repository…” menu action.
  • git dag now uses a dock-widget interface so that its widgets can be laid-out and arranged. Customizations are saved and restored the next time git dag is launched.
  • git dag now has a “Zoom Best Fit” button next alongside the “Zoom In” and “Zoom Out” buttons.
  • Ctrl+L now focuses the “Search” field in the git dag tool.
  • Right-clicking in the “diff” viewer now updates the cursor position before performing actions, which makes it much easier to click around and selectively stage sections. Previously, the current cursor position was used which meant that it required two clicks (left-click to update the position followed by right-click to get the context menu) for the desired section to be used. This is now a single right-click operation.
  • The Ctrl+D “Launch Diff Tool” action learned to automatically choose between git difftool and git mergetool. If the file is unmerged then we automatically launch git mergetool on the path, otherwise we use git difftool. We do this because git difftool is not intended to be used on unmerged paths. Automatically using git mergetool when appropriate is the most intuitive and muscle-memory-friendly thing to do.
  • You can now right-click on folders in your standard file browser and choose “Open With -> Git Cola” (Linux-only).
Fixes

  • Python 2.6 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard does not provide a namedtuple at sys.version_info. We now avoid using that variable for better portability.

  • We now read the user’s Git configuration from ~/.config/git/config if that file is available, otherwise we use the traditional ~/.gitconfig path, just like Git itself.

  • Some edge cases were fixed when applying partial/selected diffs.

  • The diff viewer is now properly cleared when refreshing.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/194

git-cola v1.8.3

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v1.8.2

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes
Fixes

  • Better error handling when cloning repositories.

    We were not handling the case where a git URL has no basename, e.g. https://git.example.com/. git cola originally rejected these URLs instead of allowing users to clone them. It now allows these URLs when they point to valid git repositories.

    Additionally, git cola learned to echo the errors reported by git clone when it fails.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/156

git-cola v1.8.1

Usability, bells and whistles

  • git dag got a big visual upgrade.

  • Ctrl+G now launches the “Grep” tool.

  • Ctrl+D launches difftool and Ctrl+E launches your editor when in the diff panel.

  • git-cola can now be told to use an alternative language. For example, if the native language is German and we want git-cola to use English then we can create a ~/.config/git-cola/language file with “en” as its contents:

    $ echo en >~/.config/git-cola/language

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/140

  • A new git cola merge sub-command was added for merging branches.

  • Less blocking in the main UI

Fixes

git-cola v1.8.0

Usability, bells and whistles

  • git cola learned to honor .gitattributes when showing and interactively applying diffs. This makes it possible to store files in git using a non-utf-8 encoding and git cola will properly accept them. This must be enabled by settings cola.fileattributes to true, as it incurs a small performance penalty.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/96

  • git cola now wraps commit messages at 72 columns automatically. This is configurable using the cola.linebreak variable to enable/disable the feature, and cola.textwidth to configure the limit.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/133

  • A new “Open Recent” sub-menu was added to the “File” menu. This makes it easy to open a recently-edited repository.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/135

  • We now show a preview for untracked files when they are clicked using the Status tool.

  • A new “Open Using Default Application” action was added to the Status tool. It is activated using either Spacebar or through the context menu. This action uses xdg-open on Linux and open on Mac OS X.

  • A new “Open Parent Directory” action was added to the Status tool. It is activated using either Shift+Spacebar or through the context menu.

  • git dag learned to honor the log.date git configuration variable. This makes the date display follow whatever format the user has configured.

  • A new git cola config sub-command was added for quickly tweaking git cola’s git configuration settings.

  • Some small usability tweaks – some user confirmation prompts were defaulting to “Cancel” when they should have been defaulting to the affirmative option instead.

Fixes
  • Properly handle arbitrarily-named branches.
  • We went back to launching git mergetool using an xterm. The reason is that there are a couple of places where git mergetool requires a terminal for user interaction not covered by –no-prompt.
  • We now properly handle an edge case when applying short diffs at the start of a file.

git-cola v1.7.7

Usability, bells and whistles
  • New and improved grep mode lets you instantly find and edit files.
  • New git cola grep standalone mode.
  • Support for passing arguments to the configured editors, e.g. gvim -p This makes it possible to select multiple files in the status window and use Ctrl-e to edit them all at once.
  • Remote operations now prompt on errors only.
  • The Tab key now jumps to the extended description when editing the summary.
  • More shortcut key labels and misc. UX improvements.
Fixes

  • Selecting an item no longer copies its filename to the copy/paste buffer. Ctrl-c or the “Copy” context-menu action can be used instead.

  • The repository monitoring feature on Windows learned to ignore changes within the “.git” directory. Thanks to Andreas Sommer.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/120

git-cola v1.7.6

Usability, bells and whistles
  • git dag learned to color-code branchy edges. The edge colors change when a new branch is detected, which makes the history much easier to follow. A huge thanks to Uri Okrent for making it happen.
  • New GUI for editing remote repositories.
  • New git cola archive and git cola remote sub-commands.
  • git cola browser learned an ‘Untrack’ command.
  • The diff editor learned to staged/unstaged while amending.
  • The status tool can now scroll horizontally.
  • New git repositories can be created by clicking ‘New’ on the git cola –prompt startup screen.

git-cola v1.7.5

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Auto-completion was added to more tools.
  • git dag is easier to use on smaller displays – the author field elides its text which allows for a more compact display.
  • Selected commits in git dag were made more prominent and easier to see.
  • ‘Create Branch’ learned to fetch remote branches and uses a background thread to do so.
  • User-configured GUI tools are listed alphabetically in the ‘Actions’ menu.
  • The ‘Pull’ dialog remembers the value of the ‘Rebase’ checkbox between invocations.

git-cola v1.7.4.1

Fixes
  • Detect Homebrew so that OS X users do not need to set PYTHONPATH.
  • git dag can export patches again.

git-cola v1.7.4

Usability, bells and whistles
  • The ‘Classic’ tool was renamed to ‘Browser’ and learned to limit history to the current branch.
  • git dag learned about gravatar and uses it to show images for commit authors.
  • git dag learned to use OpenGL for rendering resulting in much faster rendering.
  • More dialogs learned vim-style keyboard shortcuts.
  • The commit message editor learned better arrow key navigation.

git-cola v1.7.3

Usability, bells and whistles
  • git cola learned a few new sub commands:
git cola dag
git cola branch
git cola search
  • Return in the summary field jumps to the extended description.
  • Ctrl+Return is now a shortcut for ‘Commit’.
  • Better French translation for ‘Sign-off’.
  • The ‘Search’ widget now has a much simpler and streamlined user interface.
  • vim-style h,j,k,l navigation shortcuts were added to the DAG widget.
  • git dag no longer prompts for files when diffing commits if the text field contains paths.
  • General user interface and performance improvements.
Fixes
  • The diff viewer no longer changes font size when holding Control while scrolling with the mouse wheel.
  • Files with a typechange (e.g. symlinks that become files, etc.) are now correctly identified as being modified.
Packaging
  • The cola.controllers and cola.views packages were removed.

git-cola v1.7.2

Usability, bells and whistles
  • git cola can now launch sub commands, e.g.:
git cola classic
git cola stash
git cola fetch
git cola push
git cola pull
git cola tag
  • git dag is more responsive when gathering auto-completions.
  • Keyboard shortcuts are displayed when the ‘?’ key is pressed.
  • Various keyboard shortcuts were added for improved usability.
  • The status widget now lists unmerged files before modified files.
  • vim-style h,j,k,l navigation shortcuts were added to the status widget.
  • A ‘Recently Modified Files…’ tool was added.
  • Tools can now be hidden with Alt + # (where # is a keyboard number) and focused with Alt + Shift + #.
  • The syntax highlighting colors for diffs was made less intrusive.
  • The commit message editor was redesigned to have a more compact and keyboard-convenient user interface.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for adding a Signed-off-by (Ctrl + i) and creating a commit (Ctrl + m) were added.
  • The status widget was adjusted to use less screen real-estate.
Fixes
Packaging
  • Create git-dag.pyw in the win32 installer.
  • win32 shortcuts now contain explicit calls to pythonw.exe instead of calling the .pyw file directly.
Deprecated Features
  • The ‘Apply Changes from Branch…’ feature was removed. git dag’s ‘Grab File…’ feature used alongside the index/worktree editor is a simpler alternative.

git-cola v1.7.1.1

Fixes
Packaging

The cola-$version tarballs on github were originally setup to have the same contents as the old tarballs hosted on tuxfamily. The make dist target was changed to write files to a git-cola-$version subdirectory and tarball.

This makes the filenames consistent for the source tarball, the darwin .app tarball, and the win32 .exe installer.

git-cola v1.7.1

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes
  • Boolean git config settings with no value are now supported (these are not created by git these days but exist in legacy repositories).
  • Unicode branches and tags are supported in the “branch diff” tool.
  • Guard against low-memory conditions and more interrupted system calls.
Packaging
  • Added desktop launchers for git-cola.desktop and git-dag.desktop. This replaces the old cola.desktop, so some adjustments to RPM .spec and debian/ files will be needed.
  • Fixed the darwin app-tarball Makefile target to create relative paths.
Cleanup
  • The –style option was removed. git cola follows the system theme so there’s no need for this option these days.

git-cola v1.7.0

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes
Packaging
  • Bumped version number to ceil(minimum git version). git cola now requires git >= 1.6.3.
  • Simplified git-cola’s versioning when building from tarballs outside of git. We no longer check for a ‘version’ file at the root of the repository. We instead keep a default version in cola/version.py and use it when git cola’s .git repository is not available.

git-cola v1.4.3.5

Usability, bells and whistles
  • inotify is much snappier and available on Windows thanks to Karl Bielefeldt.
  • New right-click command to add untracked files to .gitignore thanks to Audrius Karabanovas.
  • Stash, fetch, push, and pull usability improvements
  • General usability improvements
  • stderr is logged when applying partial diffs.
Fixes

git-cola v1.4.3.4

Usability, bells and whistles

  • We now provide better feedback when git push fails.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/69

  • The Fetch, Push, and Pull dialogs now give better feedback when interacting with remotes. The dialogs are modal and a progress dialog is used.

Fixes

git-cola v1.4.3.3

Usability, bells and whistles
  • The git cola desktop launchers now prompt for a repo by default. This is done by using the new –prompt flag which tells git cola to ignore any git repositories in the current directory and prompt for one instead.
Fixes
  • More Unicode fixes for repositories and home directories with embedded unicode characters. Thanks to Christian Jann for patience and helpful bug reports.
  • Fix the ‘Clone’ button in the startup dialog.

git-cola v1.4.3.2

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Faster startup time! git cola now offloads initialization to a background thread so that the GUI appears almost instantly.
  • Specialized diff options for p4merge, vimdiff, araxis, emerge, and ecmerge in difftool (backported from git.git).
Fixes

git-cola v1.4.3.1

Usability, bells and whistles

  • The cola classic tool can be now configured to be dockable.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/56

  • The cola classic tool now uses visual sigils to indicate a file’s status. The idea and icons were provided by Uri Okrent.

  • Include the ‘Rescan’ button in the ‘Actions’ widget regardless of whether inotify is installed.

Packaging
  • Fix installation of translations per Fedora This incorporates Fedora’s fix for the translations path which originally appeared in cola-1.4.3-translations.patch.
  • Mac OS X git-cola developers can now generate git-cola.app application bundles using ‘make app-bundle’.
Fixes

  • Fixed a stacktrace when trying to use “Get Commit Message Template” with an unconfigured “commit.template” git config variable.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/72

    This bug originated in Redhat’s bugzilla #675721 via a Fedora user.

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=675721

  • Properly raise the main window on Mac OS X.

  • Properly handle staging a huge numbers of files at once.

  • Speed up ‘git config’ usage by fixing cola’s caching proxy.

  • Guard against damaged ~/.cola files.

git-cola v1.4.3

Usability, bells and whistles
  • git dag now has a separate display area for displaying commit metadata. This area will soon grow additional functionality such as cherry-picking, branching, etc.
Fixes

  • Fixed tests from a previous refactoring.

  • Guard against ‘diff.external’ configuration by always calling ‘git diff’ with the ‘–no-ext-diff’ option.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/67

  • Respect ‘gui.diffcontext’ so that cola’s diff display shows the correct number of context lines.

  • Raise the GUI so that it is in the foreground on OS X.

Packaging

  • We now allow distutils to rewrite cola’s shebang line. This allows us to run on systems where “which python” is Python3k. This is exposed by setting the PYTHON Makefile variable to the location of python2.x.

  • git-cola.app is now a tiny download because it no longer contains Qt and PyQt. These libraries are provided as a separate download.

    http://code.google.com/p/git-cola/downloads/list

git-cola v1.4.2.5

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Clicking on paths in the status widget copies them into the copy/paste buffer for easy middle-clicking into terminals.
  • Ctrl+C in diff viewer copies the selected diff to the clipboard.
Fixes
Packaging
  • Removed hard-coded reference to lib/ when calculating Python’s site-packages directory.

git-cola v1.4.2.4

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Removed “single-click to (un)stage” in the status view. This is a usability improvement since we no longer perform different actions depending on where a row is clicked.
  • Added ability to create unsigned, annotated tags.
Fixes
  • Updated documentation to use cola.git instead of cola.gitcmd.

git-cola v1.4.2.3

Usability, bells and whistles
Fixes

git-cola v1.4.2.2

Usability, bells and whistles
  • git dag interaction was made faster.
Fixes

  • Added ‘…’ indicators to the buttons for ‘Fetch…’, ‘Push…’, ‘Pull…’, and ‘Stash…’.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/51

  • Fixed a hang-on-exit bug in the cola-provided ‘ssh-askpass’ implementation.

git-cola v1.4.2.1

Usability, bells and whistles
Portability
  • Added cola.compat.hashlib for Python 2.4 compatibility
  • Improved PyQt 4.1.x compatibility.
Fixes
  • Configured menu actions use sh -c for Windows portability.

git-cola v1.4.2

Usability, bells and whistles

  • Added support for the configurable guitool.<tool>.* actions as described in git-config(1).

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/44

    http://schacon.github.com/git/git-config.html

    This makes it possible to add new actions to git cola by simply editing ~/.gitconfig. This implements the same guitool support as git gui.

  • Introduced a stat cache to speed up git config and repository status checks.

  • Added Alt-key shortcuts to the main git cola interface.

  • The Actions dock widget switches between a horizontal and vertical layout when resized.

  • We now use git diff --submodule for submodules (used when git >= 1.6.6).

  • The context menu for modified submodules includes an option to launch git cola.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/17

  • Prefer $VISUAL over $EDITOR when both are defined. These are used to set a default editor in lieu of core.editor configuration.

  • Force the editor to be gvim when we see vim. This prevents us from launching an editor in the (typically unattached) parent terminal and creating zombie editors that cannot be easily killed.

  • Selections are remembered and restored across updates. This makes the partial-staging workflow easier since the diff view will show the updated diff after staging.

  • Show the path to the current repository in a tooltip over the commit message editor.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/45

  • Log internal git commands when GIT_COLA_TRACE is defined.

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/39

Fixes

  • Improved backwards compatibility for Python 2.4.

  • Review mode can now review the current branch; it no longer requires you to checkout the branch into which the reviewed branch will be merged.

  • Guard against color.ui = always configuration when using git log by passing --no-color.

  • yes and no are now supported as valid booleans by the git config parser.

  • Better defaults are used for fetch, push, and pull..

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/43

Packaging

  • Removed colon (:) from the applilcation name on Windows

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/41

  • Fixed bugs with the Windows installer

    https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/40

  • Added a more standard i18n infrastructure. The install tree now has the common share/locale/$lang/LC_MESSAGES/git-cola.mo layout in use by several projects.

  • Started trying to accommodate Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in the darwin/ build scripts but our tester is yet to report success building a .app bundle.

  • Replaced use of perl in Sphinx/documentation Makefile with more-portable sed constructs. Thanks to Stefan Naewe for discovering the portability issues and providing msysgit-friendly patches.

git-cola v1.4.1.2

Usability, bells and whistles
  • It is now possible to checkout from the index as well as from HEAD. This corresponds to the Removed Unstaged Changes action in the Repository Status tool.
  • The remote dialogs (fetch, push, pull) are now slightly larger by default.
  • Bookmarks can be selected when git cola is run outside of a git repository.
  • Added more user documentation. We now include many links to external git resources.
  • Added git dag to the available tools. git dag is a node-based DAG history browser. It doesn’t do much yet, but it’s been merged so that we can start building and improving upon it.
Fixes
  • Fixed a missing import when showing right-click actions for unmerged files in the Repository Status tool.
  • git update-index --refresh is no longer run every time git cola version is run.
  • Don’t try to watch non-existent directories when using inotify.
  • Use git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name plumbing to find the name of the current branch.
Packaging
  • The Makefile will now conditionally include a config.mak file located at the root of the project. This allows for user customizations such as changes to the prefix variable to be stored in a file so that custom settings do not need to be specified every time on the command-line.
  • The build scripts no longer require a .git directory to generate the builtin_version.py module. The release tarballs now include a version file at the root of the project which is used in lieu of having the git repository available. This allows for make clean && make to function outside of a git repository.
  • Added maintainer’s make dist target to the Makefile.
  • The built-in simplejson and jsonpickle libraries can be excluded from make install by specifying the standalone=true make variable. For example, make standalone=true install. This corresponds to the --standalone option to setup.py.

git-cola v1.4.1.1

Usability, bells and whistles
  • We now use patience diff by default when it is available via git diff –patience.
  • Allow closing the cola classic tool with Ctrl+W.
Fixes
  • Fixed an unbound variable error in the push dialog.
Packaging
  • Don’t include simplejson in MANIFEST.in.
  • Update desktop entry to read Cola Git GUI.

git-cola v1.4.1

This feature release adds two new features directly from git cola’s github issues backlog. On the developer front, further work was done towards modularizing the code base.

Usability, bells and whistles
Portability
  • git cola is once again compatible with PyQt 4.3.x.
Developer
  • cola.gitcmds was added to factor out git command-line utilities
  • cola.gitcfg was added for interacting with git config
  • cola.models.browser was added to factor out repobrowser data
  • Added more tests

git-cola v1.4.0.5

Fixes
  • Fix launching external applications on Windows
  • Ensure that the amend checkbox is unchecked when switching modes
  • Update the status tree when amending commits

git-cola v1.4.0.4

Packaging
  • Fix Lintian warnings

git-cola v1.4.0.3

Fixes
  • Fix X11 warnings on application startup

git-cola v1.4.0.2

Fixes

git-cola v1.4.0.1

Fixes

git-cola v1.4.0

This release focuses on a redesign of the git-cola user interface, a tags interface, and better integration of the cola classic tool. A flexible interface based on configurable docks is used to manage the various cola widgets.

Usability, bells and whistles
  • New GUI is flexible and user-configurable
  • Individual widgets can be detached and rearranged arbitrarily
  • Add an interface for creating tags
  • Provide a fallback SSH_ASKPASS implementation to prompt for SSH passwords on fetch/push/pull
  • The commit message editor displays the current row/column and warns when lines get too long
  • The cola classic tool displays upstream changes
  • git cola –classic launches cola classic in standalone mode
  • Provide more information in log messages
Fixes
  • Inherit the window manager’s font settings
  • Miscellaneous PyQt4 bug fixes and workarounds
Developer
  • Removed all usage of Qt Designer .ui files
  • Simpler model/view architecture
  • Selection is now shared across tools
  • Centralized notifications are used to keep views in sync
  • The cola.git command class was made thread-safe
  • Less coupling between model and view actions
  • The status view was rewritten to use the MVC architecture
  • Added more documentation and tests

git-cola v1.3.9

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Added a cola classic tool for browsing the entire repository
  • Handle diff expressions with spaces
  • Handle renamed files
Portability
  • Handle carat ^ characters in diff expressions on Windows
  • Worked around a PyQt 4.5/4.6 QThreadPool bug
Documentation
  • Added a keyboard shortcuts reference page
  • Added developer API documentation
Fixes
  • Fix the diff expression used when reviewing branches
  • Fix a bug when pushing branches
  • Fix X11 warnings at startup
  • Fix more interrupted system calls on Mac OS X

git-cola v1.3.8

Usability, bells and whistles
  • Fresh and tasty SVG logos
  • Added Branch Review mode for reviewing topic branches
  • Added diff modes for diffing between tags, branches, or arbitrary git diff expressions
  • The push dialog selects the current branch by default. This is in preparation for git 1.7.0 where unconfigured git push will refuse to push when run without specifying the remote name and branch. See the git release notes for more information
  • Support open and clone commands on Windows
  • Allow saving cola UI layouts
  • Re-enabled double-click-to-stage for unmerged entries. Disabling it for unmerged items was inconsistent, though safer.
  • Show diffs when navigating the status tree with the keyboard
Packaging
  • Worked around pyuic4 bugs in the setup.py build script
  • Added Mac OSX application bundles to the download page

git-cola v1.3.7

Subsystems
  • git difftool became an official git command in git 1.6.3.
  • git difftool learned –no-prompt / -y and a corresponding difftool.prompt configuration variable
Usability, bells and whistles
  • Warn when non-fast-forward is used with fetch, push or pull
  • Allow Ctrl+C to exit cola when run from the command line
Fixes
  • Support Unicode font names
  • Handle interrupted system calls
Developer
  • PEP-8-ified more of the cola code base
  • Added more tests
Packaging

git-cola v1.3.6

Subsystems
  • Added support for Kompare in git difftool
  • Added a separate configuration namespace for git difftool
  • Added the diff.tool configuration variable to define the default diff tool
Usability, bells and whistles
  • The stash dialog allows passing the –keep-index option to git stash
  • Amending a published commit warns at commit time
  • Simplified the file-across-revisions comparison dialog
  • origin is selected by default in fetch/push/pull
  • Removed the search field from the log widget
  • The log window moved into a drawer widget at the bottom of the UI
  • Log window display can be configured with cola.showoutput = {never, always, errors}. errors is the default.
  • NOTE – cola.showoutput was removed with the GUI rewrite in 1.4.0.
Developer
  • Improved nose unittest usage
Packaging
  • Added a Windows/msysGit installer
  • Included private versions of simplejson and jsonpickle for ease of installation and development

Indices and tables