Show HN: Git-knife – edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet
Git-knife is a new GUI tool designed to allow developers to edit Git commit metadata, such as messages, authors, and dates, in a spreadsheet-like interface. It aims to fill a gap in the current ecosystem by providing a safe, visual way to perform bulk metadata rewrites.
Why it matters
For software developers, maintaining clean and accurate version control history is essential for project management and auditing, yet existing tools often make complex metadata edits difficult.
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 .
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