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

“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

It looks like the screenshot was an actual photo of someone's monitor. I'm left wondering why print screen wasn't utilized. And for some reason it really makes me not want to touch this project.

Note: This will not work and cannot work on repos that use signed commits from multiple authors.

Signed git history is immutable, and unsigned git history is a supply chain attack vector.

That said I could see this being useful for single-author WIP branches doing cleanup before a PR

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

I appreciate that it uses git-notes and that is makes backup branches in it's own namespace. I wish it were a bit lighter though.

Haven't seen mentioned, but you might want to check out https://github.com/mystor/git-revise

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

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

This looks cool! Are there screenshots available?

Extra points for the name.

Two recent threads where I sing some praises of git rebase -i, specifically linking it to a spreadsheet. Awesome to see this pop up, feels serendipitous!

Git rebase -i is not that scary 119 points, 16 days ago, 151 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053385 https://cachebag.sh/journal/interactive-rebasing/

Staging patches with git add 34 points, 12 days ago, 52 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048570 https://cachebag.sh/journal/interactive-rebasing/

Really enjoying jj these days but the git rebase -i spreadsheet remains such a winner. Expanding it more, leaning in, ftw.

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

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.

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