📃 gitdevlog —

A tiny CLI + Git hook that asks: “Why did you really make that commit?”
And then quietly builds a timeline of your thoughts for future you... and your team.

⚡ TL;DR

A post-commit journaling sidekick for your Git workflow.
After each commit, gitdevlog whispers:

Want to log this commit?

You drop a thought or two — a why, a hacky reason, a future warning.
Boom. Logged, timestamped, and searchable forever.

🤔 What is this?

gitdevlog is a lightweight memory layer for developers.

It's not your Git message.
It's the story behind your Git message.

After every Git commit, it politely asks:

Want to log this commit? (leave empty to skip)
Why | Notes: ________________

✅ You jot a short note — about your intent, context, or frustration
✅ It saves that with the commit
✅ Builds a searchable timeline of your reasoning
✅ Helps avoid re-debugging, context loss, and "why the heck did I do this?"

💡 Why?

Because your commit message says:

fix: minor auth redirect

...but your brain meant:

"Spent 2 hours on this weird redirect loop in Safari.
Turns out the state param was missing from the callback URL. Rage."

Let’s capture that. While it’s fresh.

"Git tells you what changed. This tells you why."

💡 MORE Why though?

Let’s be honest: You’ve looked at your own code a week later and thought:

“Wth was I trying to solve here?”

You ?: Same.

Your team? Same.

Your future self? Definitely same. Probably filing a bug report against past-you.

But if you have genuinely solved this memory-gap problem...

We clearly have a lot to discuss. I think we’re both building tools for developers because even superheroes forget why they saved the world , it's deep , —our tools might help developers remember their own genius moments. NOT CRYIINGGG ;( not at ALLLL .

✨ Features

• 🧠 Post-commit prompt → why and notes
• 🗃 Local logs → stored in .devlog/logs/
• 🔍 gitdevlog list → view all past logs
• 🔎 gitdevlog search <text> → find old context, like "Find that bug note from 2 weeks ago"
• 🕰️ gitdevlog timeline → generate beautiful Markdown or HTML timelines
• 🖤 Zero config, works out of the box
• 📦 Ship as a reusable npm module

🚀 Getting Started

Installation:

npm install -g gitdevlog

Usage:

npx gitdevlog init

☝️ That sets up a post-commit hook for your current repo.

From now on, every commit is followed by:

Want to log this commit?
> Log (why | notes):

✔️ Leave it blank to skip ✍️ Type whatever you want 📦 Done

CLI Commands

npx gitdevlog list

View all past logs

npx gitdevlog search "your search term"

Finds logs that mention “your search term” in any field. Magic.

npx gitdevlog timeline

Generates a Markdown timeline of your logs.

npx gitdevlog timeline --html

Generates a Dark Mode HTML timeline with 🔍 filtering and 🔃 sorting.

🧘 Ideal for:

🧑‍💻 Solo devs who never forgets ;) 👩‍👧‍👦 Teams who want more than "Update" commits 🐛 Debugging what you did last month 🧠 Leaving breadcrumbs for Future You™

🧠 Philosophy

Code is fast. Context is fragile.

We write Git messages for machines and changelogs. gitdevlog is for you. The human. The debugger. The coffee-powered context reclaimer.

🫡 Built With

12 lines of "I'll remember this later"

1 weekend of “let’s just ship it”

🛠️Author:

• cinfinit — a dev who’s tired of future-me yelling at past-me.

  In nut shell , this is how it actually started:

"You can't remember why you made that commit. I can't either. Let's fix that."