gitdlg

git dialog — a TUI dialog editor for Git commit messages.

Built with Zig 0.16 and libvaxis. Use it as $GIT_EDITOR / core.editor when you want a structured Subject + Body form instead of a plain text file.

中文文档

Features

• Subject + Body form in a centered dialog
• Tab / Shift+Tab to move focus (Subject → Body → Confirm → Cancel)
• Confirm and Cancel buttons with keyboard shortcuts
• Parses git # comment lines in COMMIT_EDITMSG
• Cancel restores the original file (:q! semantics; exit 0)
• UI follows terminal default colors (bold / dim / reverse only)
• Locale-aware UI: English by default; Chinese when LANG / LC_* starts with zh
• macOS Terminal.app compatibility for CJK subject rendering

Build & install

Requires Zig 0.16+.

cd /path/to/gitdlg
make build
make install
gitdlg --help

By default, make install installs to ~/.local/bin/gitdlg. Override the location with PREFIX or BINDIR:

make install PREFIX=/usr/local
make install BINDIR=/custom/bin

Equivalent Zig command:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

No Zig? If you prefer not to compile the Zig version, check out the py branch for a pure Python 3 implementation.

Install Zig 0.16 (if missing)

macOS: brew install zig

Linux (x86_64):

curl -fsSL -o /tmp/zig.tar.xz \
  https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/zig-x86_64-linux-0.16.0.tar.xz
tar -xf /tmp/zig.tar.xz -C ~/.local/opt
export PATH="$HOME/.local/opt/zig-x86_64-linux-0.16.0:$PATH"
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/opt/zig-x86_64-linux-0.16.0:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

Mirrors: community mirror list

Configure Git

# persistent
git config --global core.editor gitdlg
# or with an absolute path:
git config --global core.editor /path/to/gitdlg

# one-off
GIT_EDITOR=gitdlg git commit

Keys

Key	Action
Tab / Shift+Tab	Cycle Subject → Body → Confirm → Cancel
↑↓←→ on buttons	Move between Confirm / Cancel
Ctrl+S	Confirm (save message)
Enter on button	Activate Confirm or Cancel
Esc	Cancel (restore original COMMIT_EDITMSG)

Test

make test

Run individual checks:

make test-unit
make test-integration
make test-smoke
make test-terminal

License

MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 Jiaji Yin. See LICENSE.