I built a tree-like navigation tool for viewing diff in kakoune
Why?
- I need to quickly review pull request, we a glance of file tree, and quickly jump between them
- But I don’t want to use GitHub Web UI: it was pretty slow
- thought it has improved a lot these days, I still prefer terminal tools over web UI
- lazygit is not enough
- lumen wasn’t there yet
How my diff experience evolves over the years
- The start: SourceTree app (before the Atlassin aquired lol)
- VSCode Source control view, Gitlens and GitGraph plugin
- Fork.app
- Start using more command line: inline diff pager
- from delta, difftastic to git-split-diffs
- good but it’s still hard to jump between files
- After coming to kakoune:
- Everything is composable
- Heavily use with tmux & fzf that integrates well with kakoune
How a about building a command palette, and even a file tree, with just fzf tmux and kakoune?
The flow:
- Parse diff format, get location and file name
- Render the file list with fzf
- Bind fzf actions to send “scroll to” command to kakoune (using a forked version kks, becuase
kks catgets unstable results) - Of course built with AI
And we have a even better tool today!
It’s called lumen! Written in Rust, with built‑in AI integration and lazygit‑inspired ergonomics. Thank you Sahaj for building this.
And I just vibe coded two more scripts that wraps around lumen:
