committer

A terminal UI for writing git commit messages with AI. Reviews your staged diff, generates a conventional commit message, lets you edit it, and commits — all from the keyboard (some buttons also support mouse).

Note from the creator: I know editors like VS Code already have this kind of feature built in. I just wanted to build something with OpenTUI — it seemed like a great fit for this.

Install

Option 1: installer (prebuilt binary)

Downloads the latest release binary for your platform (macOS, Linux, or Windows via Git Bash/MSYS2/Cygwin) to ~/.local/bin:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/juji/committer-tui/main/install.sh | bash

Supports x64 and arm64. Without a bash shell on Windows, download the matching .exe from the latest release directly.

Option 2: npm

npm install -g committer-tui

Installs a small wrapper that downloads the matching prebuilt binary for your platform on install (same binaries as Option 1).

Option 3: build from source

Requires Bun.

git clone [email protected]:juji/committer-tui.git
cd committer-tui
bun install
bun build --compile src/index.tsx --outfile committer-bin
ln -s "$(pwd)/committer-bin" /usr/local/bin/committer

(bin/committer.mjs is the npm-installed wrapper and expects a downloaded prebuilt binary next to it — not used when building from source.)

Usage

From inside a git repo with staged changes:

committer

Or during development, without linking:

bun dev

CLI mode

Prefer the terminal over a TUI? -c (or --cli) runs the same commit cycle as plain prompts — no full-screen UI:

committer -c

It checks that a provider is configured, asks which changed file(s) to include (all selected by default), generates a commit message with your configured model(s), lets you confirm, edit (opens $EDITOR), or cancel, then commits.

Shortcuts

| Key | Action | | -------- | ------------- | | ctrl+g | Open config | | ctrl+y | View history | | ctrl+c | Exit |

Configuration

Press ctrl+g inside the app to add a model, or edit the config file directly at:

• Linux/macOS: ~/.config/committer/config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%/committer/config.json

Each model needs a provider, model name, and API key:

{
  "models": [
    { "name": "My Model", "provider": "gemini", "model": "gemini-2.0-flash", "apiKey": "..." }
  ]
}

Supported providers: openai, anthropic, gemini, groq, cerebras, mistral, deepseek, together, fireworks, xai, perplexity, requesty, openrouter, ollama, ollama-cloud. ollama runs against a local server (defaults to http://localhost:11434) and doesn't need an API key. ollama-cloud runs against https://ollama.com and needs an API key from your Ollama account.

You can also override the instructions sent to the model with instructionPrefix / instructionSuffix, either from the config screen or directly in the JSON file.

maxRetries (config screen or config.json) controls how many times a failed API call is retried before falling back to the next configured model. Leave it unset for the default (2 retries); set it to 0 to disable retries entirely.

Privacy

API keys are stored only in your local config.json and sent only to the provider you configured for that model, directly from your machine — never to any server we run. Your diff is sent only to the model provider you pick, solely to generate the commit message; nothing is logged or transmitted anywhere else.

Releasing

Pushing a v* tag triggers CI to cross-compile binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows and attach them to a GitHub Release:

git tag v0.1.0
git push --tags

For a pre-release (beta, rc, etc.), use a tag with a hyphen suffix — CI marks it as a GitHub pre-release automatically, so install.sh (which downloads from releases/latest) skips it until you promote a stable tag:

git tag v0.2.0-beta.1
git push --tags

Development

bun dev          # run with file watching
bun dev:rmconf   # wipe local config