Why Your Git Workflow Deserves Better Tooling

Git is powerful, but its raw command-line interface can be verbose and unforgiving. A growing ecosystem of open source CLI tools has emerged to wrap, extend, and enhance Git — making code review, history navigation, and branch management significantly faster. Here are the tools worth adding to your setup.

gh — GitHub's Official CLI

Repository: github/cli

The gh CLI brings almost all of GitHub's web interface into your terminal. With it you can:

  • Create and review pull requests: gh pr create, gh pr review
  • Manage issues: gh issue list, gh issue create
  • Clone any repo quickly: gh repo clone owner/repo
  • Run GitHub Actions and view workflow logs

It's particularly valuable when you're contributing to many projects and need to context-switch rapidly without leaving the terminal.

lazygit — Terminal UI for Git

Repository: jesseduffield/lazygit

Lazygit provides a clean, keyboard-driven terminal user interface (TUI) for Git. It visualizes your staging area, branch history, and file diffs side by side. Key strengths include:

  • Interactive rebasing made visual and intuitive
  • One-keystroke staging of individual lines or hunks
  • Branch visualization that makes complex histories readable

If you've ever dreaded interactive rebases, lazygit makes them approachable.

delta — A Syntax-Highlighting Diff Viewer

Repository: dandavison/delta

Delta replaces the default Git diff output with syntax-highlighted, side-by-side diffs. Configure it as your Git pager in ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
    pager = delta
[delta]
    side-by-side = true
    line-numbers = true

The difference in readability — especially for large diffs — is immediately noticeable.

git-absorb — Automatic Fixup Commits

Repository: tummychow/git-absorb

When you make small fixes to a feature branch that's already been reviewed, git absorb automatically figures out which existing commit your staged changes belong to and creates a fixup commit for it. Combine with git rebase --autosquash to keep your history clean with minimal effort.

tig — Text-mode Interface for Git

Repository: jonas/tig

Tig is a lightweight TUI for browsing Git history, blame views, and tree navigation. It's faster to launch than a full GUI and works over SSH, making it excellent for inspecting repositories on remote servers.

Comparison Table

Tool Primary Use Learning Curve
gh GitHub PR/issue management Low
lazygit Full Git TUI Medium
delta Better diffs Very Low
git-absorb Fixup commits Low
tig History browsing Low

Getting Started

You don't need to adopt all of these at once. A good starting point is delta (zero workflow change, instant payoff) followed by gh if you work on GitHub. Add lazygit when you're ready to invest a little time learning a TUI that will pay dividends for years.

All of these tools are actively maintained open source projects — contributions welcome.