Show HN: Git-knife – edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet

YYonathanTesfaye about 2 hours ago 32 commentsRead Article on github.com

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Discussion Sentiment

63% Positive

Analyzed from 641 words in the discussion.

Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

NichoPaolucci•23 minutes ago

“It never reimplements git — it shells out to the system git CLI and rebuilds commits with git commit-tree, reusing each commit's original tree so file contents are provably never changed.”

Glad the LLM noted this - I was worried this would reimplement git

whateveracct•3 minutes ago

why can't anyone just do things themselves anymore? it's all LLM crap

gritzko•13 minutes ago

Reimplementing the good parts of git takes maybe 2-3 days with Claude. I did that, and I use it daily instead of legacy git. Commit, merge, push to GitHub, all the usual things. Zero issues in the past 3 months, absolutely boring.

Building the new things turned out to be a longer and way more interesting story. https://replicated.live/blog/click

YonathanTesfaye•20 minutes ago

Ha ha fair. But yeah shelling out to git and reusing the original tree object was deliberate means file contents can't change even if I screw up elsewhere.

Myzel394•16 minutes ago

Why would you think such a project would reimplement git?

mminer237•7 minutes ago

I believe that was sarcasm.

iamcoder18•about 1 hour ago

This is cool, but has anyone ever needed to rewrite commit authors or dates?

simonw•26 minutes ago

I've needed to do this for a bunch of reasons.

1. Sometimes I do a scraping project where I want the commit dates to match when the data actually changed, reconstructed from sources like the Internet Archive or the dates on https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro... - for example here: https://github.com/simonw/research/commits/main/extract-syst... - or this project that attempted to reconstruct the history of Tim Berners-Lee's original browser: https://github.com/simonw/1991-WWW-NeXT-Implementation/commi...

2. Sometimes I split a Git repo into two, and I want to preserve the commit history (authors and dates) on the files that end up in the new repo - effectively replay the history of just one folder from the original to help create the new one.

3. I occasionally mess up cleaning up and merging a PR from an open source contributor such that the work is incorrectly credited to me. I'll fix the commit so that it credits the right person.

fmorel•22 minutes ago

git-filter-repo is amazing for the second case. I've used it to split repos and rename folders multiple times.

simonw•20 minutes ago

Yeah, I wrote a TIL about that a few years ago: https://til.simonwillison.net/git/rewrite-repo-specific-file...

xp84•about 1 hour ago

Yes, for instance it could be useful if someone’s been accidentally committing with a bogus email address. Or if you’re cleaning up some sort of mess and would like to recreate an accurate history.

Obviously as with any “force push” situation, the usual caveats apply if this is on a branch others have checked out, but if the mess is big enough, it is sometimes worth it to send everyone a script to reset or just to have people delete and re-check-out.

schainks•34 minutes ago

If someone's been committing with a bogus email address and they're still working on the project, shouldn't they clean up their own commits?

blazarquasar•30 minutes ago

Yeah, using this tool for example?

webstrand•14 minutes ago

Usually its me who has been committing with a bogus email address, because I don't like having my real user/email set in my $HOME/.gitconfig

f1shy•about 1 hour ago

Yes. Absolutely! Many times I had a wrong configured terminal and messed up the author. Often I work in different projects, privately and in my work, and I use different authors for both

icase•about 1 hour ago

yes; when i wanted to make it look like i didn’t procrastinate for a week and implement the entire feature in one day

mellosouls•about 1 hour ago

Hmmm, this seems to be making easy something you normally should not do.

Carrok•about 1 hour ago

So, exactly like a knife? Generally we don't want to cut people open, but when we need to do it, like during surgery, a sharp knife sure helps.

YonathanTesfaye•about 1 hour ago

that's it

YonathanTesfaye•about 1 hour ago

Agreed mostly. The intent is local cleanup before you push like fixing a wrong author email across a batch or dates from a machine with a bad clock

hootz•21 minutes ago

Would be great to have this, but as a TUI tabular editor.

f1shy•42 minutes ago

I would like to see something like this in magit. Other there is already?

YonathanTesfaye•28 minutes ago

No idea not an emacs person does magit handle bulk author/date edits or just reword? genuinely curious

cautiouscat•about 2 hours ago

This looks cool! Are there screenshots available?

YonathanTesfaye•about 1 hour ago

https://imgur.com/a/V5EGCOw

yboris•about 1 hour ago

Please put up this or another screenshot as the first thing you see in the README - please!

I'm reluctant to clone a repository and spend time on it just to find out the project looks crap and I don't want to use it. A screenshot saves other people's time :)

YonathanTesfaye•about 1 hour ago

done

esafak•about 1 hour ago

I'd put that in the repo not here.

YonathanTesfaye•about 1 hour ago

you're right, done

sixtyj•about 1 hour ago

Extra points for the name.

YonathanTesfaye•about 1 hour ago

Appreciate it! pick a commit, stab it

YonathanTesfaye•about 2 hours ago

I built a small Tauri app that just shows your commits in a table and lets you edit message/author/date directly, plus find & replace with regex if you need to fix a bunch at once. It backs up the branch before it rewrites anything doesn't touch file contents, just metadata.