// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: Git-knife – edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet
Stab your git history into shape — every commit's message, author, and dates,
edited like a table.
A clean desktop GUI for editing git commit metadata directly — message,
author date, committer date, author name/email.
Existing GUIs (GitKraken, Sublime Merge, Fork, lazygit) reword and reorder well
but treat commit dates as effectively immutable and don't expose committer
date / author identity for arbitrary commits. The tools that can rewrite that
metadata (git-filter-repo, git rebase env tricks, git commit-tree) have no
GUI. git-knife fills that gap.
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.
Legend: ✅ first-class · ⚠️ possible but awkward/limited · ◐ dated or terminal UI · ❌ not supported · 🚧 planned.
The polished GUIs reword and reorder well but treat commit dates — especially
the committer date — as effectively immutable, and none offer a bulk regex pass
over author identity. The tools that can rewrite that metadata have no GUI.
git-knife is the intersection: a clean GUI that edits every field, in bulk, safely.
The first cargo build downloads and compiles the Tauri crates (a few minutes).
Packaging (tauri build) needs app icons. They're already committed under
src-tauri/icons/; regenerate from any square PNG with
pnpm tauri icon path/to/icon.png. Dev runs don't need them.
.github/workflows/release.yml builds native installers for macOS, Linux, and
Windows with tauri-action and
attaches them to a draft GitHub Release. Cut a release by pushing a tag:
(or trigger it manually from the repo's Actions tab). No code signing is set
up yet, so macOS/Windows builds are unsigned — fine for early testers.