Show HN: Git-knife – edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet

git-knife 🔪 Stab your git history into shape — every commit's message, author, and dates, edited like a table. A clean desktop GUI for editing git commit metadata directly — message, author date, committer date, author name/email. Existing GUIs (GitKraken, Sublime Merge, Fork, lazygit) reword and reorder well but treat commit dates as effectively immutable and don't expose committer date / author identity for arbitrary commits. The tools that can rewrite that metadata (git-filter-repo, git rebase env tricks, git commit-tree) have no GUI. git-knife fills that gap. It never reimplements git — it shells out to the system git CLI and rebuilds commits with git commit-tree, reusing each commit's original tree so file contents are provably never changed. How it compares Legend: ✅ first-class · ⚠️ possible but awkward/limited · ◐ dated or terminal UI · ❌ not supported · 🚧 planned. The polished GUIs reword and reorder well but treat commit dates — especially the committer date — as effectively immutable, and none offer a bulk regex pass over author identity. The tools that can rewrite that metadata have no GUI. git-knife is the intersection: a clean GUI that edits every field, in bulk, safely. Status (MVP) ✅ Open a repo, list commits on the current branch ✅ Edit message / author name+email / author date / committer date / committer name+email ✅ Bulk find & replace across those text fields, literal or regex (great for fixing a wrong email everywhere) ✅ Preview every change before applying ✅ Automatic backup ref before each rewrite + one-click restore ✅ Warns when a rewrite would touch already-pushed history ✅ Merge commits are locked (not editable in this version) ⛔ Not yet: reorder / squash / drop, merge rewriting, staging/branches/remotes Requirements git (2.x) Node.js + pnpm (corepack enable pnpm, or npm i -g pnpm) Rust (stable) — install via https://rustup.rs Linux system deps for Tauri v2: webkit2gtk-4.1, libgtk-3, libayatana-appindicator3, librsvg2 (Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev) Run (dev) pnpm install pnpm tauri dev The first cargo build downloads and compiles the Tauri crates (a few minutes). Build a bundle pnpm tauri build Packaging (tauri build) needs app icons. They're already committed under src-tauri/icons/; regenerate from any square PNG with pnpm tauri icon path/to/icon.png. Dev runs don't need them. Packaging (tauri build) needs app icons. They're already committed under src-tauri/icons/; regenerate from any square PNG with pnpm tauri icon path/to/icon.png. Dev runs don't need them. Automated releases (GitHub Actions) .github/workflows/release.yml builds native installers for macOS, Linux, and Windows with tauri-action and attaches them to a draft GitHub Release. Cut a release by pushing a tag: git tag v0.1.0 git push origin v0.1.0 (or trigger it manually from the repo's Actions tab). No code signing is set up yet, so macOS/Windows builds are unsigned — fine for early testers. Editing history & pushing Edit a commit Open a repository (Browse… or paste the path). Click any non-merge commit to expand its editor. Change the message, author/committer name, email, or dates. Edited rows are highlighted; the date fields keep the commit's original UTC offset. Click Review & apply, check the old → new preview, and confirm. git-knife rewrites only your local branch. It never contacts a remote and never pushes for you — pushing is always your explicit step. Bulk find & replace Click Bulk find & replace above the commit table to change text across many commits at once: Pick which fields to target (message, author/committer name, author/committer email — any combination). Enter Find / Replace. Toggle Regex for pattern matching with $1 backreferences, or leave it off for a literal search. Case-sensitive is on by default. The panel live-counts matching commits and replacements. Click Stage edits to turn them into highlighted rows, then Review & apply as usual. Example — move every commit from an old email to a new one: target Author email + Committer email, find old@example.com, replace new@example.com. Merge commits are skipped, and successive passes compose. Push a rewrite Editing a commit changes its hash and the hash of every commit after it, so your local branch and the remote have diverged. A normal git push is rejected as non-fast-forward. Push with a lease: git push --force-with-lease origin --force-with-lease refuses the push if the remote moved since your last fetch, so you can't silently clobber a teammate's commits. Prefer it over plain --force, which skips that safety check. git-knife shows a "rewrites pushed history" warning when your edit reaches into commits that already exist on the upstream. If you can, edit only unpushed commits — rewriting shared history forces everyone else to re-sync. git-knife shows a "rewrites pushed history" warning when your edit reaches into commits that already exist on the upstream. If you can, edit only unpushed commits — rewriting shared history forces everyone else to re-sync. After rewriting shared history Anyone who already pulled the old commits now has divergent history. Each of them re-syncs their local branch to the new remote state: git fetch origin git reset --hard origin/ # discards local-only commits — coordinate first Undo a rewrite In-app: the Backups panel restores the pre-rewrite tip in one click. In-app: the Backups panel restores the pre-rewrite tip in one click. From the CLI: every apply saved a backup ref — git for-each-ref refs/knife-backup # find the pre-rewrite tip git reset --hard # move the branch back git reflog also lists the old tip. If you already force-pushed, restore locally and then git push --force-with-lease again. From the CLI: every apply saved a backup ref — git for-each-ref refs/knife-backup # find the pre-rewrite tip git reset --hard # move the branch back git reflog also lists the old tip. If you already force-pushed, restore locally and then git push --force-with-lease again. Signature note (transparent) By default git-knife attaches a small, disclosed note to each rewritten tip commit, on its own notes ref so it never touches your regular notes: git notes --ref=git-knife show # read it git for-each-ref refs/notes/git-knife # was this repo edited by git-knife? It's invisible in a normal git log (separate ref) but fully discoverable — no hidden encoding. Toggle it off anytime with the 🔪 signature note checkbox in the app (the setting is remembered). To strip it from a repo entirely: git update-ref -d refs/notes/git-knife How it works src-tauri/src/git.rs — the only place that spawns git. commits.rs — open_repo, list_commits (NUL/record-separator parsing). rewrite.rs — preview_edits + apply_edits: rebuilds the chain from the earliest edited commit to the tip via commit-tree, then saves a backup ref and moves the branch with a compare-and-swap on the old tip. backup.rs — lists refs/knife-backup/* and restores via git reset --hard. The rewrite strategy is validated at the git level by scratchpad/verify_engine.sh (reproduces the exact commit-tree flow and asserts the content diff is empty). Safety Every apply creates refs/knife-backup/ / pointing at the old tip before touching anything. Nothing is force-deleted; restore is always available from the Backups panel.