G.ART

Git Advanced Rebase Tool

A small CLI tool that provides some shortcuts to simplify interactive rebase. The tool allows to describe rebase commands in commit message itself using special syntax. Those commands will be automatically transformed into git rebase commands during rebase.

Example

Example commit message that can be processed by gart:

\gart mv 1 & sq

Breakdown:

Command	Description
\gart	Commit message prefix that tells gart tool to process this line.
mv 1	A command to move current commit up by 1 position in git commit history.
&	Logical and operator to combine commands into a sequence.
sq	A command to squash the current commit with previous one.

Build & Install

Building requires cargo to be available on your machine. Build and install the tool set by running the script:

./script/install.sh

On success the following executables will be built and installed:

~/.local/bin/gart
~/.local/bin/gart_editor
~/.local/bin/gart_seq_editor

Might be convenient to add ~/.local/bin to PATH to simplify usage. Note that gart_editor and gart_seq_editor are also available in ~/.cargo/bin. gart is only installed into ~/.local/bin.

Targets

1. gart_editor

The executable is used by gart script as GIT_EDITOR during interactive rebase to edit commit messages. Is not meant to be used directly.

2. gart_seq_editor

The executable is used by gart script as GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR during interactive rebase to edit sequence files. Is not meant to be used directly.

3. gart

The main script that runs interactive rebase. The script uses gart_editor and gart_seq_editor as git editors to process commit messages and sequence files during interactive rebase.

$ gart --help
Usage: gart [OPTIONS] <COMMIT_HASH>

Options:
  -h, --help      Show help message
  -V, --version   Show version

Arguments:
  COMMIT_HASH     Commit hash to rebase to

Syntax

General syntax for commit message to be processed by gart:

\gart <COMMAND> [& <COMMAND>]*

Supported list of commands:

Command	Description
mv <POS:INT>	Move commit by position in git commit history. Positive moves the current commit up (towards the root). Negative moves the commit down (towards the HEAD). Target position must be a valid position within rebase range.
sq	Squash commit with the previous one. The message with \gart command will be cleared. Equivalent to fixup git rebase command

Environment Variables

The following environment variables are available to customize gart behavior:

Variable	Default Value	Description
GART_EDITOR	gart_editor	Executable to be used as GIT_EDITOR. If using default value ensure that the path to it is provided by PATH. Default installation dir for gart_editor is ~/.local/bin
GART_SEQ_EDITOR	gart_seq_editor	Executable to be used as GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR. If using default value ensure that the path to it is provided by PATH. Default installation dir for gart_seq_editor is ~/.local/bin

TODO

Some ideas for further improvement (TBD):

• Run gart util in default mode (without providing commit hash). Process fixed number of last commits.
• Split commit utils.
• Define command prefix based on env variable.
• Implement drop commits by hash.