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 message when trying to navigate to a parent commit when there's no parent.
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.