Scrub through a file's git history like a video timeline — forward and inverted.
tenetui turns a file's history into a scrubbing timeline you move through, the way you'd scrub a video. Move the playhead and the main pane shows the file exactly as it existed at that commit; press play and watch it grow, get refactored, and shrink in seconds. Named after Tenet: history plays forward and inverted, and what happened, happened.
The GIF is produced from
demo.tapewith vhs:cargo build --release && vhs demo.tape.
git log -p and git log -L give you walls of diff with no spatial continuity.
git blame shows only the last touch per line, hiding the history underneath.
The mental model you actually want is temporal — history as a continuous medium
you move through, not a list of artifacts you inspect one by one. tenetui is a
player, where tig/gitui/lazygit are commit browsers.
cargo install tenetuitenetui <repo> <file>
# e.g. from inside a checkout:
tenetui . src/main.rs
# omit the file to open the volatile-files overview and pick one:
tenetui .Scrub with h/l, press space to play, ? for the full key list. That's it.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
h / l (or ←/→) |
scrub one commit back (inverted) / forward |
space |
play / pause (continues in the last scrub direction) |
+ / - |
faster / slower playback |
w / b |
jump forward / back a day |
{ / } |
jump back / forward a week |
g / G |
first commit / last commit (HEAD) |
/ |
fuzzy-search commit messages |
B |
toggle the blame gutter |
t |
temporal pincer: two playheads, forward + inverted, side by side |
m |
space-time map: history as a gravity-well constellation around the playhead |
Tab |
switch focus between the pincer panes |
j / k |
scroll the file |
? |
help overlay |
q |
quit |
In pincer mode, space runs both playheads at once — the forward pane steps
toward HEAD (red) while the inverted pane runs toward the root (blue), the two
jaws of the timeline closing as they go.
Changed lines glow — red when moving forward, blue when inverted — and fade over the next few steps, leaving a comet trail during playback. The timeline is a temporal pincer: red toward the future, blue toward the past, a white-hot pivot at the playhead.
Optional, at ~/.config/tenetui/config.toml (and platform equivalents):
speed_ms = 150 # initial playback cadence (ms per commit)
cache_size = 512 # snapshot LRU capacity
[keybinds] # key = action-name, layered over the defaults
x = "quit"
"ctrl-r" = "scrub_forward"A missing file or a bad value falls back to defaults with a warning — the config never stops the app.
Everything that moves means something: the cold open converges from both ends
of the timeline (TENET is a palindrome), reversing direction plays a brief
turnstile flip in the new direction's hue, playback leaves a heat trail on the
timeline and a comet trail on the map — and every effect is pure color math
that decays in a few frames. Press ? and check the bottom of the overlay.
The aesthetic is drawn from the film. In Tenet, Christopher Nolan color-codes the two directions of time: red for forward entropy, blue for inverted. That maps exactly onto scrubbing toward HEAD (forward) versus toward the root (inverted), so red and blue are the app's only two saturated colors, over a cold steel base. True color by default, degrading gracefully to 256- and 16-color terminals — where red and blue still exist, so the meaning survives.
Built with --features functions, F opens a picker of the functions in the
current file (Rust, via tree-sitter); choosing one scopes the pane to that
function so you can watch just it evolve as you scrub. Esc unscopes. It's
opt-in because tree-sitter and its grammar are a heavy dependency — the default
build stays light.
cargo install tenetui --features functionscargo build --release
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo bench # criterion benches for the hot paths
cargo test --features functions # exercise the optional function trackingDual-licensed under either MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.