Git Bonsai

Git Bonsai is a command-line tool to help you tend the branches of your git garden.

Usage

Just run git bonsai in a git repository checkout.

What does it do?

At startup, Git Bonsai fetches remote changes and iterate on all your local branches to update the tracking ones with their remote counter-parts.

Then it shows you a list of the merged branches and asks if you want to delete them.

Is it safe?

Git Bonsai takes several precautions to ensure it does not delete anything precious:

It refuses to run if there are any uncommitted changes. This includes unknown files.
To ensure branches are safe to merge, Git Bonsai always deletes branches using git branch -d not git branch -D. To do so, it switches to the first branch containing the branch to delete before deleting it. For example, given this git commit graph:

    o          b2
   / \
  o---o--o     b1
 /        \
o----------o-- master

Git Bonsai detects branch b2 can be merged because b1 and master contain it and b1 can be merged because master contains it.

To delete them it first switches to b1 and run git branch -d b2. Then it switches to master and run git branch -d b1.

Git Bonsai never touches the remote repository.

Installation

The easiest way to install is to download an archive from the release page, unpack it and copy the git-bonsai binary in a directory in $PATH.

Building it

Git Bonsai is written in Rust. To build it, install Rust and then run:

cargo install git-bonsai

Why yet another git cleaning tool?

I created Git Bonsai because I wanted a tool like this but also as a way to learn Rust. There definitely are similar tools, probably more capable, and the Rust code definitely needs work, pull requests are welcome!