Hi HN, I've been building Ziggity, a keyboard-driven terminal UI for Git.
It's inspired by lazygit (which I used daily), but written from scratch in Zig rather than being a port.
Why another one? Two reasons, honestly. There were a few areas of lazygit I wanted to improve on for my own workflow, and I wanted a real project to build in Zig, which is genuinely powerful and fast, and a joy once it clicks. It compiles to a single small static binary with explicit memory ownership and no libgit2, it just shells out to the `git` you already have. The UI is built on libvaxis. And I let myself add a bit of sugar along the way, because a tool you stare at all day might as well be pleasant.
A few things that are a bit different from lazygit:
- A divergence view + status-coloured commit hashes so ahead/behind commits stand out at a glance
- Independent drill-downs in the Branches/Commits panels (deliberate, not a port artifact)
- Line level staging, interactive rebase, custom patch building, bisect, arbitrary-ref diffing
It's honest about its stage: v0.3.0, macOS/Linux/Windows builds, MIT. The Windows build compiles and libvaxis supports it, but I haven't smoke-tested it on real hardware yet. There's an about screen with a spinning ASCII donut, because why not.
Install: `brew install simoarpe/ziggity/ziggity`, or grab a static binary
from the releases page.
I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, especially on the UX and on the Zig code if you're into that. It's a spare time project, so bug reports and "this feels wrong" notes are welcome.
It's probably because of HN's anti-LLM filter. I don't know if submitters use LLMs to touch up their descriptions or if these descriptions often use LLM-like phrasing.
Also lots of "genuinely" and some air quoted phrases which are another tell.
I guess you folks are right and it's probably the llm filter. I looked at the GitHub and thought it had too many screenshots to not have had some human effort, but who knows these days.
If that's what happened, I wonder if the same filters exist for tools like Grammarly. Some people are English as a second language, and some people simply want to put the best foot forward and make the best first impression.
I've used Lazygit daily for almost four years. It's a fantastic project, and I suggest donating to Jesse as he did a great job.
In my daily job a heavily use Git and a few things bothered me, so I decided to create my own project. Go is not a language I wanted to explore, while I had this interest in giving Zig a try, so eventually I picked it and was blown away by how fast it can be. There's a file called ENHANCEMENTS_OVER_LAZYGIT.md (https://github.com/simoarpe/ziggity/blob/main/docs/ENHANCEME...) but I'll soon merge it into the main README. At my daily job, I handle huge git projects, and use Ziggity daily now, and I'm much more productive.
I can name a few improvements over Lazygit in random orders:
- Text selection with automatic copy, it works super smoothly and it's useful when you need to quickly copy a commit hash, a portion of code, a diff, or a branch name.
- Force-push with lease, it's something that should be always used when force pushing. If you work in a large codebase it should always be your first attempt after a rebase, and that's how Ziggity works. It will ask to fallback to normal force-push if it didn't work, but you'll remain in control.
- Git actions are async without leaving the TUI: this is in my opinion the biggest improvement over Lazygit, and it makes me much more productive, Lazygit was continuously switching to prompt and asking to press to return back to the TUI. There are also good reasons for this but as a general philosophy I wanted something different, and more optimized.
- I've implemented the 50/72 rule (https://dev.to/noelworden/improving-your-commit-message-with...) for the commits and I can finally prepare good commits, where I highlight when a title is too long and there's a shadow for the linewrap. They are both configurable so I'm not forcing this option.
- I have also implemented the correct behavior a couple of other features that are currently broken on Lazygit, the most serious one for example is that switching branch by name is completely broken and you'll end up in commit in a detached state (try yourself if you don't believe me).
If you decide to give Ziggity a try, I'm happy to receive feedback
fyi, a couple of features that lazygit does not have, or that aren't easily done in lazygit and which pycharm does quite well (I've used _many_ git tools, and IMO pycharm's internal implementation is still the best, but I switched to lazygit because I dropped pycharm for zed).
- diff any branch against any other branch (lazygit relies on certain branches being marked or inferred as main branches against which you can diff)
- see a file's git history (and which branches those commits are on), drill into the commits
- github (or gitlab, codeberg, etc.) support: open commit in github (easiest way to share commit with a co-worker, for example)
another feature that pycharm has (and Zed though not as well implemented): insert the filename into the commit text.
zed inserts the filename but doesn't allow you to edit the commit (so it's all or nothing), pycharm allows you to edit the commit prepopulated with the filename if only one file is staged.
another enhancement is that neither pycharm or zed can handle inserting multiple filenames into the commit. so while editing the commit, you could potentially have keys to insert the staged filenames, i.e., by pressing a meta+number key combo where ctrl+1 inserts the first filename in the staged list, ctrl+2 the second, 1-9. just an idea.
So many wrong assumptions in a single message.
Lazygit is a fantastic project, I've been using it for several years, but there were so many things I wanted to improve/change, that eventually I decided to create my own project. Go is not a language I wanted to explore, while I had this interest in giving Zig a try, so eventually I picked it and was blown away by how fast it can be.
There's a file called ENHANCEMENTS_OVER_LAZYGIT.md (https://github.com/simoarpe/ziggity/blob/main/docs/ENHANCEME...) but I'll soon merge it into the main README.
At my daily job, I handle huge git projects, and use Ziggity daily now, and I'm much more productive.
I can name a few improvements over Lazygit in random orders:
- Text selection with automatic copy, it works super smoothly and it's useful when you need to quickly copy a commit hash, a portion of code, a diff, or a branch name.
- Force-push with lease, it's something that should be always used when force pushing. If you work in a large codebase it should always be your first attempt after a rebase, and that's how Ziggity works. It will ask to fallback to normal force-push if it didn't work, but you'll remain in control.
- Git actions are async without leaving the TUI: this is in my opinion the biggest improvement over Lazygit, and it makes me much more productive, Lazygit was continuously switching to prompt and asking to press to return back to the TUI. There are also good reasons for this but as a general philosophy I wanted something different, and more optimized.
- I've implemented the 50/72 rule (https://dev.to/noelworden/improving-your-commit-message-with...) for the commits and I can finally prepare good commits, where I highlight when a title is too long and there's a shadow for the linewrap. They are both configurable so I'm not forcing this option.
- I have also implemented the correct behavior a couple of other features that are currently broken on Lazygit, the most serious one for example is that switching branch by name is completely broken and you'll end up in commit in a detached state (try yourself if you don't believe me).
So to answer your question: You should not switch to Ziggity if you are fine with Lazygit. But if you are a proficient Git user, handle largit Git projects, and you have used Lazygit for a while and noticed a few things were "suboptimal"; then you should give Ziggity a try.
Happy to receive feedback and suggestions if you have any.
I've used Lazygit for several years, and it's an amazing project, but I'm much faster and productive with Ziggity now: you'll never leave the TUI, and the text is selectable with the mouse.
