BeardGit

The Git client that keeps up with your repo — and your pull requests, issues, pipelines, and releases.

Native desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Built with Tauri 2 (Rust) and Svelte 5.
Canvas-based graph, AI integration, bundled gh and glab, multi-project tabs — and no Electron.

Install · Highlights · Build from source · Contribute

Why BeardGit

BeardGit is the client I wanted and could never find: fast like a CLI, rich like a web UI, quiet like a native app. It pulls the daily workflow into one window — graph, staging, branches, pull requests, issues, pipelines, releases, terminals, and AI assistants — without ever feeling heavy.

• Canvas graph that scales. 100K+ commits render smoothly. Branch lanes, merge curves, sync-state lines, and author highlighting, all driven by a viewport-sliced renderer.
• Forge-native. Create, edit, merge, approve, and comment on MR/PRs. Manage issues, labels, milestones, assignees. Trigger and retry CI pipelines. Publish releases and upload assets — all without leaving the app.
• Bundled CLIs. gh and glab ship with the installer on every platform. No setup, no PATH dance.
• Zero-nag AI integration. Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode detect automatically. Launch them in a PTY terminal, or let them draft commit messages and review staged changes.
• Real terminals, in the app. xterm.js with WebGL, fed by a native Rust PTY. OSC 7 auto-links the terminal to the matching project tab. Composite tabs keep project and shell paired.
• Honest performance. Virtual scroll, lazy CodeMirror grammars, xterm instance pool, rayon for graph construction, debounced fs events. No Electron overhead.
• Secure by default. PATs stored with AES-256-GCM under a machine-derived key. CLI OAuth supported via gh / glab.

Highlights

Git, done right

Visual canvas graph for 100K+ commits. Staging with hunk/line granularity. Branch, tag, stash, and worktree management with context menus everywhere. Three-way merge editor with accept / ignore / undo, rebase (interactive + non-interactive), revert, amend, reset, cherry-pick, and git-bisect with a visual workflow and auto-bisect mode. File history with rename detection, blame with gutter annotations, reflog with recovery actions, clean with preview, patches, submodules — the full toolbox.

Pull requests, issues, pipelines, releases

A clean ForgeProvider abstraction wraps gh and glab to give you full lifecycle control of MR/PRs (labels, reviewers, draft/ready, reopen, discussion resolution, local checkout), issues (with milestones and assignees), CI/CD actions (trigger, retry, retry-failed-only, per-job retry, cancel), and releases (including asset upload streamed via the task system). Auto-detects the provider from the git remote and works with self-hosted GitLab and GitHub Enterprise.

AI providers, first class

A provider-neutral AI layer with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode built in. Detect installed providers, show their version, let the user pick a default. Generate commit messages, review staged changes, review a PR — all gated on "there's actually something to talk about" so you don't get empty replies. Launch the interactive CLI in a PTY terminal with the right flags, worktree, or session resume.

Terminals and multi-project tabs

Composite tabs combine a project and its linked terminals (or worktrees) in a single pill. Instant switching via a viewport cache. OSC 7 shell integration so navigating to a project path inside a terminal auto-links that terminal to the matching tab. Foreground process polling detects when claude / codex / opencode start and updates the tab label + brand icon on the fly.

Observability and quality

Structured file logging via tracing with daily rotation and 7-day auto-purge. Tracing spans across every git write and every Tauri command, with sensitive payloads redacted. Trait-crate purity enforced at CI (no runtime deps allowed in contract crates). Full WebdriverIO + tauri-driver E2E suite runnable locally in Docker or on CI via xvfb.

Tech stack

Architecture in one glance

Three layers with strict boundaries. Only app-core depends on Tauri — every other crate is a reusable library.

Installation

Pre-built installers are published on every tagged release:

Download the latest version from the Releases page, pick the installer that matches your platform, and run it. gh and glab are bundled in every installer; no extra setup needed.

First launch — unsigned builds

BeardGit is currently distributed without Apple or Microsoft code-signing certificates, so both operating systems will flag the app the first time you open it. The app is safe; the warnings exist because the binaries are not notarized/signed. Follow the steps below to allow the app to run — you only need to do this once per install.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/BeardGit.app

Building from source

Prerequisites

• Git 2.x+ — required at runtime for write operations (merge, rebase, push, pull, cherry-pick, stash).
• Rust stable — install via rustup.
• Node.js 22+ — install from nodejs.org.

xcode-select --install

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential curl wget file \
  libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev

sudo pacman -S --needed webkit2gtk-4.1 base-devel curl wget file \
  openssl appmenu-gtk-module libappindicator-gtk3 librsvg xdotool

sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1-devel openssl-devel curl wget file \
  libappindicator-gtk3-devel librsvg2-devel libxdo-devel
sudo dnf group install "c-development"

Build and run

git clone [email protected]:The3eard/BeardGit.git
cd BeardGit
npm install
npm run tauri dev

First build compiles every Rust crate and takes roughly 3–5 minutes. Subsequent runs are fast.

To build a release bundle for your platform:

npm run tauri build

Running the E2E suite locally

npm run e2e:docker

Requires Docker Desktop (macOS) or dockerd (Linux). The first run builds the image (~10 min). After that, named volumes keep cargo and node_modules warm and iteration is ~1–2 min per cycle. See e2e/README.md for full details.

Branch strategy

Contributing

Pull requests welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. All contributors must sign a short CLA before their changes can be merged.

If you find a bug, open an issue. If you're unsure whether something's a bug, a limitation, or an opportunity for a plugin, open it anyway — we'd rather over-triage.

License

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — free for non-commercial use with attribution and share-alike. See the license file for the full terms.

Made with cargo, coffee, and stubbornness by Adolfo Fuentes.