gitview

Terminal view of a GitHub user's public repositories: language bytes (summed from each repo's languages API, not primaryLanguage), stars, and a small TUI or JSON.

Build

Needs Go 1.22 or newer (this module uses the version in go.mod).

go build -o gitview .

Token

Live fetches require a GitHub token in the environment. Do not pass it as a flag, do not put it in the repo, and do not write it to .env in this tree (.env is gitignored).

export GITHUB_TOKEN
# then paste the value into your shell, or:
export GITHUB_TOKEN="$(cat /path/to/local/token-file)"

Public repos of any user work with a token that can read public data.

Your own private repos appear only when <user> is your GitHub login and the token can read private repos:

• Classic PAT: enable the repo scope (not public_repo only).
• Fine-grained PAT: resource owner = you, repository access = All repositories (or the private ones you care about).

GET /users/{you}/repos is public-only even with a powerful token; gitview uses GET /user/repos when the login matches. Organization repos are still excluded.

The token is never printed in logs, JSON, the cache file, or the TUI. If you ran gitview before private-repo support, pass -fresh (or wait an hour) so the cache is not reused.

-h, -version, and a cache hit less than one hour old do not need a token.

Usage

gitview [flags] <user>

Flags go before <user>.

Flag	Default	Meaning
-top N	8	Languages to show before Other (>= 1)
-json	off	Print JSON to stdout; do not open the TUI
-forks	off	Include forked repos
-fresh	off	Ignore cache and refetch
-all	off	List every included repo (by last update). Default is 5.
-version		Print gitview 0.1.0 and exit 0

gitview -json golang
gitview -top 5 octocat
gitview -all emicastro

Default view is one compact panel: a header line, a full-width ribbon segmented by language share, and a grid of name | bar | percent rows (HTML and CSS omitted). It is two columns at 85 columns or wider, one column below that, and percentages only under 60 columns. The panel never grows past 85 columns, so the bars stay comparable between runs.

╭─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  gitview  ·  @emicastro            87 repos · 0 stars · 9 langs · cached     │
│  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────  │
│  █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████   │
│                                                                             │
│  Rust       ███████▎░░░░░░░░░░░  38.0   Go         ███▋░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  18.8  │
│  JavaScript ██▍░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  12.4   Lua        ██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  10.4  │
│  other      █▎░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░   6.4                                        │
╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
  tab expand   r refresh   q quit

Press tab for Recently updated — five repos by GitHub updated_at in a second panel, or the full list with -all.

TUI keys: tab expand or collapse the repo list, j/k or arrows move the selection in it, r refresh, q or Ctrl+C quit.

Colors are Catppuccin: Mocha on a dark terminal, Latte on a light one.

Cache and limits

• Cache: $XDG_CACHE_HOME/gitview/<user>.json or ~/.cache/gitview/<user>.json, TTL 1 hour.
• Only repos listed under that login (not organization repos).
• GitHub rate limits still apply with a token (unauthenticated mode is not supported).
• A missing user, bad token, or rate limit is an error (exit 1). Missing <user> or missing GITHUB_TOKEN on a live fetch is usage (exit 2).

Tests

Offline; they do not call GitHub.

gofmt -l .
go vet ./...
go test ./...
go test -race ./...