Committing your work

This page covers the commit panel, the diff viewer, stashes and signed commits.

The commit panel

Choose Commit in the rail. The panel lists everything in your working tree that differs from the last commit, in two groups:

Group	What it holds
Changes	Files Git already tracks: edited, added, deleted or renamed.
Unversioned Files	Files Git has never seen.

A file starts ticked only if it is already staged. Nothing else joins a commit until you tick it, so a build folder or an editor settings file never ends up in a commit because you did not notice it.

A tick is a real stage

Ticking a file runs git add, and unticking it runs git reset. The panel always shows what Git’s index holds. Stage a file with git add in a terminal and it appears ticked. Unstage it and it loses its tick.

When only part of a file is staged, its box shows a dash and the row says partly staged. Click the box once to stage the rest of the file. Click it again to unstage the whole file.

Press Commit, or Command or Control with Enter in the message box. Gitkeen commits exactly what the index holds: the ticked files and, for a partly staged file, only the staged hunks. A renamed file is one row, and Gitkeen records it as a rename.

The colour of a file name shows its state:

Colour	Meaning
Blue	Edited or renamed.
Green	New and already staged.
Grey, with a line through it	Deleted.
Brown	Git has never seen this file.
Red	The file has a merge conflict.

Amend

Tick Amend to replace the previous commit instead of making a new one. The message box fills with that commit’s message, and gives your own text back if you untick it. If the commit is already on a remote, Gitkeen says so first, because publishing the replacement needs a force push.

When the rules change

The panel says so on screen in these two cases:

While a merge or a rebase is unfinished, Git commits the whole working tree. The tick boxes stop applying.
A file with a merge conflict cannot be committed until you resolve it. Gitkeen names those files.

Rolling back a file

Right click a file and choose Roll back to throw away your changes to it. A newly added file becomes unversioned again and stays on disk. Gitkeen never deletes a file. The Undo panel can bring the changes back.

The toolbar above the list groups the files by folder, opens and closes those folders, and reads the working tree again.

Commit messages

Gitkeen checks the message as you type, against the rules of the repository you opened. It looks for them in this order:

The repository has	What Gitkeen does
A commitlint config, such as `commitlint.config.js` or `.commitlintrc`	Shows the format under the message box, and names each broken rule as you type. Commit stays off until the message follows every rule that commitlint would reject.
A commit-msg hook, in `.husky/commit-msg` or `.git/hooks/commit-msg`	Says that the hook runs when you commit. Its rules cannot be read in advance, so Git reports a refusal only when you commit.
Neither	Offers the Conventional Commits format as a hint. Nothing is blocked.

Gitkeen checks the commitlint rules that people meet most often, such as the type, the scope, the subject and the length of the first line. It ignores a rule it does not know, so it never blocks a commit that commitlint would allow.

Suggest

Suggest writes the subject for you from the ticked files, with an AI model, and follows the same rules. See AI help to set up a model. Without one, the button reads Suggest… and opens Settings to connect one.

A message that breaks the rules, the problems named below it, then Suggest writing a subject that follows them

The diff viewer

There are two ways to open it:

In the commit panel, double click a file, or select it and press Enter. You see what committing that file would record.
In the commit details below the graph, click a file. You see what that commit did to it.

The viewer covers the window, because a side by side view needs the width. Press Escape to close it.

Control	What it does
Unified	One column, with removed and added lines one after the other.
Side by side	Two columns: the old file on the left, the new one on the right.
Working tree	The change that is not staged yet.
Staged	The change already in the index.
Hunk box	Tick the hunks you want, then press Stage selected. On the Staged tab, Unstage selected does the opposite.
Line number of a changed line	Click it to leave that one line out of the stage, or to bring it back.
Roll back selected…	Throws the selected hunks or lines away. Staged changes are not touched, and the Undo panel can bring them back.
Stage file, Unstage file	Stages or unstages the whole file.

When you stage or unstage every hunk, the viewer moves to the other tab by itself.

Leaving a debug line out of the commit, then staging the rest of the file

Both layouts mark the words that changed inside a line, so a line where one name changed does not look rewritten. Code is coloured by its language, which Gitkeen reads from the file name. About 30 languages are known, and the colours follow the palette you chose.

Case	What you see
A renamed file	The old name in the header. If only the name changed, the viewer says so.
An image	The picture before and after, side by side, with its size in pixels and bytes. PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP, ICO and AVIF are shown.
Another binary file	A note that the file changed.
A permission change	A note that Git recorded a change although the text is the same.
A very large file	The first 800 lines, with a button to show more.

Stashing work you are not ready to commit

Tick the files in the commit panel and press the stash button in its toolbar. Gitkeen saves the changes and takes them out of your working tree. Only the ticked files are stashed, so you can set one piece of work aside and continue with another.

This is Git’s own stash, so git stash list shows the same stashes.

The Stashes section at the bottom of the commit panel lists them. Open a stash to see its files, and click a file to read what it holds. Right click a stash for these actions:

Action	What it does
Unstash	Puts the change back and removes the stash.
Apply and keep	Puts the change back and keeps the stash.
Delete	Throws the change away. The Undo panel can put the stash back.

To take back only some files, open the stash and tick them. Unstash puts those files back and takes them out of the stash, and the other files stay in it. Apply, keep stash puts them back and leaves the stash as it is. A chosen file that has changes of its own is refused, so nothing is overwritten, and the Undo panel can put the whole stash back.

Ticking two files in a stash and unstashing only those

An unversioned file that you stash is removed from disk until you unstash it. The dialog says so before it runs. If a stash does not fit your files any more, Git leaves conflicts to resolve and keeps the stash, so nothing is lost.

Signed commits

When Git has a signing key set up (user.signingkey, and gpg.format ssh for an SSH key), the commit panel shows a Sign box next to Amend. It starts ticked when your Git settings sign every commit (commit.gpgsign).

The commit details show whether a commit’s signature is good:

Label	Meaning
signed, verified	The signature is good, and Git trusts the key.
signed, key not trusted	The signature is good, but Git does not trust the key.
signed, cannot be checked	This computer does not know the key. For SSH, the key is not in `gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile`.
signed, signature expired, key expired or key revoked	The signature was good once, but no longer counts.
bad signature	The commit does not match its signature. It may have been changed after it was signed.

Hover over the label to see the signer and the key.

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