- Category
- Developer Tools
- Rank
- No. 1804Tools index
Previous survey · No. 1815 ·
- Pricing
- Open Source
- Type
- TOOL
- Builder
- knadh
- GitHub
- 110 stars
- Date
About
Utility for visualising git commit activity as bars on the terminal.
What it does
Git Bars reads repository history through Git, groups commits by day, week, month, or year, then prints proportional Unicode bars. You can narrow results by date range or author email substring, reverse their order, and include otherwise empty dates.
Why it's ranked here
Its appeal is focus. One command turns local history into a readable activity pattern without a dashboard or service. Date grouping and author filtering add useful control, while the small interface and text-only output keep its scope deliberately narrow.
What's good
It invokes Git without a shell, reducing command interpretation risk. Counts are normalized against the busiest period, so relative activity is easy to scan. Weekend rows receive color, and the summary reports both total commits and represented periods.
Tradeoffs
Output uses a fixed bar width and ANSI coloring rather than adapting to terminal conditions. Author matching only checks email substrings. It offers no branch selector, structured export, or interactive exploration. Boolean options also require values, which is less natural than ordinary command flags.
How to use it well
Use it inside a local repository for quick activity checks, especially when comparing periods or isolating one contributor by email. It suits terminal-first workflows and lightweight retrospectives. Choose another tool when you need shareable reports, machine-readable results, cross-repository analysis, or hosted collaboration features.
Technical notes+
setup.py packages gitbars with setuptools and registers the git-bars console script at gitbars.gitbars:main. gitbars/gitbars.py uses argparse, runs git log --pretty=format:%ai|%ae --reverse through subprocess.check_output with shell=False, aggregates records in OrderedDict instances, normalizes counts, and writes Unicode bars directly to stdout. README.md documents pip installation and basic use. LICENSE contains the MIT terms. gitbars/__init__.py exposes the gitbars module.
Observed
- License
- MIT License
- Primary language
- Python
- Installation
- Published for installation with pip as git-bars
- Interface
- Command-line utility registered through a setuptools console script
- Declared Python support
- Python 2 and Python 3
- Runtime dependency
- Invokes the local Git command to read repository history
Read from README.md, setup.py, gitbars/gitbars.py, gitbars/__init__.py, LICENSE.
What it can do
Display git commit activity as bar chart visualization
Git repository → Terminal-based bar chart showing commit frequency
Analyze git commit history patterns
Git repository commit data → Visual representation of commit activity over time
Generate terminal-based commit statistics
Git repository → Text-based statistical visualization in terminal
Track developer productivity through commit visualization
Git commit logs → Bar graph showing commit activity patterns
Tags
Tech Stack
Comments (0)
No comments yet
Editorially curated, with community endorsements as a secondary signal. Corrections welcome.