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

Existing git GUIs like GitKraken, Sublime Merge, Fork, and lazygit handle rewording and reordering well but treat commit dates — especially the committer date — and author identity for arbitrary commits as effectively immutable. The CLI tools that can rewrite that metadata (git-filter-repo, git rebase environment tricks, git commit-tree) have no GUI. git-knife fills this gap with a clean desktop interface that edits every commit field in bulk.

git-knife 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 unchanged. The MVP supports opening a repo, listing commits on the current branch, editing message, author name/email, author date, committer date, and committer name/email, and bulk literal or regex find & replace across those text fields (useful for fixing a wrong email everywhere). It includes preview before applying, an automatic backup ref before each rewrite with one-click restore, and warns when a rewrite would touch already-pushed history. Merge commits are locked in this version; reorder/squash/drop, merge rewriting, and staging/branches/remotes are not yet implemented (reorder is planned).

A feature comparison shows git-knife offers first-class support for reword, edit author date, edit committer date, edit author/email, and bulk regex replace, while GitKraken and others miss at least one of these; for example, GitKraken only supports author date via amend, Sublime Merge and Fork don't support committer date editing, and none offer proper bulk regex over author identity. git-filter-repo supports everything but is CLI-only.

Build requirements include git 2.x, Node.js with pnpm, Rust stable, and on Linux webkit2gtk-4.1, libgtk-3, libayatana-appindicator3, and librsvg2. Development runs with 'pnpm install' and 'pnpm tauri dev'; packaging with 'pnpm tauri build' requires app icons (already committed). GitHub Actions workflow builds native installers for macOS, Linux, and Windows.