gitpro

Browse a GitHub project board from the terminal, from inside the checkout it belongs to.

cd ~/Projects/some-repo
gitpro

It asks git which repository that is, asks GitHub which Projects v2 boards the repository is linked to, and opens the cards on one: searchable as you type, and filterable by state and by kanban column.

┌──────────────────── gitpro · e-matrix/eec · #13 e-Matrix System ─────────────────────┐
│report                                                                                │
│──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│▌ ●  #382 20260911-07 placeholder - Report filter        Grooming      e-matrix/eec    │
│  ●  #385 20260911-11 placeholder - Team leader report   Grooming      e-matrix/eec    │
│                                                                                      │
│^I details   ^O open   ^F filter   ^R reload   ESC quit                           2/18│
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Keys

Typing searches. There is no mode to enter and no key to press first — the search field has the keyboard from the moment gitpro opens, so every printable character is the query's and everything else is bound to a key the field does not want.

^I is the byte the Tab key sends — a terminal cannot tell the two apart — so Tab opens the card too. q is a letter, so in the list it goes into the search field like anything else; in the popups, where there is nothing to type into, it closes. ^A is the one binding taken off the search field — it is readline's "start of the line" there, and Home still does that.

The card

^I opens a centred popup with the card's title, description, state, column, repository, author, labels, assignees, milestone and dates. Everything in it was fetched with the board, so it opens instantly and keeps working with the network gone — including the card it moves to next.

j and k walk the list with the popup still open, which is what reading through a column is: open the first card, keep pressing j. The popup does not hold the list — it asks the list view to move its selection and is handed back whatever is now selected. So the selection behind the popup moves with it, the search and the switches still decide what "next" means, and closing leaves the cursor on the card you stopped at.

The switches

^F opens the filter, which has a group per axis:

• State — open, closed, merged, draft. Only the states the board actually has get a switch, so a board of nothing but issues is not offered a merged one. A merged pull request is its own state rather than a closed one.
• Columns — one per column of the board's kanban field, plus No column.
• Labels — one per label any card wears, plus Unlabelled.
• Assignees — one per person any card is assigned to, plus Unassigned.

SPACE toggles the switch under the cursor, a turns them all on, n turns them all off, ESC or q closes. The list narrows behind the popup as the switches are set, so you can see what a switch does before you commit to it.

Everything starts on. The groups combine — a card is shown when it passes every axis and the search. Within a group a card can hold several values (two labels, two assignees) and passes while any of them is on, so turning one label off hides the cards that wear only that label, not every card wearing it.

Columns come from the board, so an empty column is still a switch. States, labels and assignees come from the cards, so they appear once the board has loaded — a filter popup left open while that happens grows the new groups where it stands.

Options

gitpro                     the board of the repository you are standing in
gitpro --project 13        that board, when the repository is on several
gitpro --repo owner/name   somewhere other than here
gitpro --list              the boards this repository is on, and stop

Without --project, the repository's first open board is opened, and a note on stderr names the others when there is more than one.

Installing

gitpro talks to GitHub through the gh CLI, which must be installed and logged in with the project scope:

gh auth login
gh auth refresh -s project      # if 'project' is not already in gh auth status

Then build the binary. It is an escript — one self-contained file that runs wherever it is called from:

From Hex, which builds the escript and puts it on your PATH in one step:

mix escript.install hex gitpro

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/iboard/gitpro.git
cd gitpro
mix deps.get
mix escript.build         # ./gitpro
mix escript.install       # ~/.mix/escripts/gitpro, put that on your PATH

Either way the escript lands in ~/.mix/escripts, so that wants to be on your PATH.

bin/gitpro runs it from the source tree, rebuilding when the sources have changed — handy while working on it, and still correct about the directory it was called from:

cd ~/Projects/some-repo && ~/Projects/gitpro/bin/gitpro

How it is put together

The UI is Atui, a terminal toolkit in the shape of Phoenix LiveView: views with state, a render/2 that returns cells, and a runtime that owns the terminal. It comes from Hex; to work on both at once, point the dependency in mix.exs back at a local checkout:

{:atui, path: "../atui"}

Two things are deliberate:

Failing happens in the terminal, not in the UI. "Not a git repository", "gh is not installed", "this repository is not on a project board" are printed on stderr with a non-zero exit status, before the alternate screen is opened. Only the slow call — the cards themselves — is left to the view, which draws its first frame before any of them have arrived and stays usable while they load.

Everything that decides what is on screen is a pure function over data. Gitpro.Filter.apply/2, the GraphQL decoders, the row widths, the window onto a list longer than the screen, the rows a card turns into in the detail popup. So the interesting half of the application is tested without a terminal, and without a token:

mix test

The API documentation is on HexDocs, or mix docs builds it locally.

Not yet

An MVP, and it shows. The obvious next things:

• comments and sub-issues in the detail popup, which today shows the card itself
• moving a card between columns from here, rather than in a browser
• remembering the switches per board between runs
• searching the description text, which today is deliberately not searched
• --project by title as well as by number

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.

Copyright (C) 2026 Andreas Altendorfer

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Atui, the toolkit this is built on, is Apache-2.0, which GPLv3 is compatible with.