gitview

What it is good at

• Answering the question a commit count cannot

  A branch merged by squash stays ahead of the trunk forever while contributing nothing, so its commit count says nothing and git branch --merged never sees it. Where a repository permits nothing but squash, and many do, that check is not unreliable - it is always wrong. gitview merges the trunk into a throwaway copy of each branch and compares the resulting tree against the trunk's. Equal means the branch adds nothing.

• Being fast enough to run without thinking about it

  The obvious implementation needs a worktree per branch and is slow enough to be annoying, so the check runs in two tiers. A trivial merge into a temporary index answers most branches in milliseconds with no checkout at all, and it is trusted only when it says yes. Only the branches it could not prove finished get a real merge in a throwaway worktree.

• Flagging the work that exists on one machine

  A branch whose unpushed column reads no remote is the urgent row in the table: that work is backed up nowhere. The skill is told to say so rather than leaving it as one number among several.

• Refusing to delete anything it cannot re-verify

  A table is a snapshot, and a repository worked by several sessions moves underneath it. So each branch is re-checked immediately before it goes, its commit SHA is printed first so a wrong call can be undone, and any branch with a worktree or an open pull request is refused out loud rather than skipped quietly.