Rebased

A git client based on the IntelliJ platform.

Motivation

Rebased is an open-source remake of the short-lived jetbrains git client. It's basically just a JetBrains IDE with all the bundled plugins removed except the git integration, with some additional UI tweaks.

See this youtrack issue for the many reasons people have been requesting this for almost a decade. At the time of writing, it's the #3 most upvoted open issue on YouTrack.

Installation

Linux

Download the appimage from GitHub releases.

We recommend using either AppManager or Gear Lever to install it to your applications menu, and for automatic updates.

Windows

You can either download the installer .exe from GitHub releases or install via winget:

winget install detachhead.rebased --source winget

macOS

Install with homebrew:

brew install detachhead/tap/rebased

Manual installation

Download the .dmg from GitHub releases

After copying Rebased.app to your Applications folder, you may see the following error message:

"Rebased.app" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Bin.

This is Apple lying to you. Nothing is "damaged", it's just not code-signed with an Apple Developer certificate. To fix it, run the following command:

xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Rebased.app

Exclusive Features

In addition to all the git-related features from IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, Rebased has some additional features which aren't available in any of the official JetBrains IDEs.

Customizable git log location

By default, the git log in Rebased is located in the main editor window, as the graph is typically the main focus of a git GUI client. However, if you prefer it to be in the tool window at the bottom like in JetBrains IDEs, you can disable this behavior:

1. Go to Settings > Version Control > Log
2. Uncheck "Show the log in the editor window"

Option to disable the .idea directory

Unlike the .vscode directory, most of the config files generated by JetBrains IDEs are unfortunately not suitable to commit, as they often contain device-specific file paths that don't work if shared with other members of your team.

Rebased is intended to be used with a wider variety of projects, which means you're more likely to use it with repos that weren't intended to be opened in a JetBrains IDE. This means .idea config files aren't committed nor are they excluded in .gitignore. This results in Rebased generating unwanted config files most of the time.

To address this problem, Rebased allows you to disable the creation of the .idea directory in the project root:

1. Go to Settings > Appearance and Behavior > System Settings
2. Uncheck "Store project settings in the project root directory"

Note

This does not disable project-level config. Instead, Rebased will store each project's config inside a single centralized .idea directory in the same place as the IDE's global settings.

Additional TextMate bundles

IntelliJ Community Edition includes syntax highlighting for many languages, even when their corresponding language plugin is not installed, thanks to the TextMate Bundles plugin.

Unfortunately however, syntax highlighting is only available for some languages in their respective paid plugins/IDEs.

One of the goals of Rebased is to prevent users from having to install bloated plugins when they only want basic editor/git functionality, so we ship some additional TextMate bundles that aren't present in IntelliJ:

• vue

(currently only one language, but feel free to open an issue or PR for others)

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Credits

• https://github.com/obiscr/intellij-community - a previous attempt at creating a JetBrains git client that I cherrypicked some commits from
• JetBrains (obviously)