Crate branchless

Branchless workflow for Git.

Why?

Most Git workflows involve heavy use of branches to track commit work that is underway. However, branches require that you “name” every commit you’re interested in tracking. If you spend a lot of time doing any of the following:

• Switching between work tasks.
• Separating minor cleanups/refactorings into their own commits, for ease of reviewability.
• Performing speculative work which may not be ultimately committed.
• Working on top of work that you or a collaborator produced, which is not yet checked in.
• Losing track of git stashes you made previously.

Then the branchless workflow may be for you instead.

Branchless workflow and concepts

The branchless workflow does away with needing to explicitly name commits with branches (although you are free to do so if you like). Rather than use branches to see your current work items, you simply make commits as you go.

The branchless extensions infer which commits you’re working on, and display them to you with the git smartlog (or git sl) command.

A commit is in one of three states:

• Main: A commit which has been checked into the main branch. No longer mutable. Visible to you in the branchless workflow.
• Visible: A commit which you are working on currently. Visible to you in the branchless workflow.
• Hidden: A commit which has been discarded or replaced. In particular, old versions of rebased commits are considered hidden. You can also manually hide commits that you no longer need. Not visible to you in the branchless workflow.

Modules

config	Accesses repo-specific configuration.
eventlog	Process our event log.
formatting	Formatting and output helpers.
gc	Deal with Git’s garbage collection mechanism.
graph	Renders the smartlog commit graph based on user activity.
hide	Handle hiding commits when explicitly requested by the user (as opposed to automatically as the result of a rewrite operation).
hooks	Callbacks for Git hooks.
init	Install any hooks, aliases, etc. to set up git-branchless in this repo.
mergebase	Persistent storage to cache merge-base queries.
metadata	Additional metadata to display for commits.
navigation	Convenience commands to help the user move through a stack of commits.
restack	Handle “restacking” commits which were abandoned due to rewrites.
smartlog	Display a graph of commits that the user has worked on recently.
testing	Testing utilities.
undo	Allows undoing to a previous state of the repo.
util	Utility functions.