Glinter

Glinter is a high-performance, transparent Git wrapper built with Bun. It enhances the standard git add workflow with a beautiful, interactive CLI interface while acting as a seamless pass-through for all other Git commands.

Preview

Features

• Interactive add: When you run g add, it presents a color-coded list of your modified, new, and deleted files. You can multi-select exactly what you want to stage using a GUI-like interface in your terminal.

• Transparent Wrapper: For every other command (like commit, push, log, or status), Glinter acts as a direct tunnel to Git. It preserves all original colors, formatting, and interactive features of the native Git CLI.

• Safe by Default: Automatically filters and prevents accidental staging of sensitive files: .env and node_modules.

• Abbreviation: You can use g instead of git.

How it works

Glinter is designed to be as "natural" as possible, meaning it shouldn't feel like a wrapper at all.

1. The Transparent Proxy

In src/index.ts, Glinter uses Bun.spawn with stdio: 'inherit'. This is a low-level operation that connects the standard input, output, and error streams of the Git process directly to your terminal.

• Result: Git "knows" it's in a real terminal, so it correctly detects colors and allows for interactive prompts (like credential entry).

2. Reliable Status Parsing

For the interactive add feature, Glinter runs git status --porcelain.

• Why?: Standard git status output is designed for humans and can change based on your Git version or system language. --porcelain is a machine-readable format that is consistent across all environments, making the file detection 100% reliable.

3. Interactive Selection

Using the @clack/prompts library, Glinter transforms the raw status data into a selectable list.

• The selection logic uses Bun's high-speed shell to execute the final git add command, correctly escaping filenames to handle spaces and special characters.

Installation

To use Glinter as your primary Git interface (e.g., using the command g):

npm install -g @jannael/glinter

For Development

1. Clone the repo
2. Install dependencies: bun install
3. Link the binary: bun link

now you can simply run:

g add           # Opens the interactive selector
g add <file>    # Runs standard git add <file>
g status        # Runs standard git status
g push          # Runs standard git push