4. Write a [good commit message](http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html).
5. Issue that pull request!
If you've never written Go in your life, then join the club! Lazygit was the maintainer's first Go program, and most contributors have never used Go before. Go is widely considered an easy-to-learn language, so if you're looking for an open source project to gain dev experience, you've come to the right place.
This project is written in Go. Go is an opinionated language with strict idioms, but some of those idioms are a little extreme. Some things we do differently:
1. There is no shame in using `self` as a receiver name in a struct method. In fact we encourage it
2. There is no shame in prefixing an interface with 'I' instead of suffixing with 'er' when there are several methods on the interface.
3. If a struct implements an interface, we make it explicit with something like:
```go
var _ MyInterface = &MyStruct{}
```
This makes the intent clearer and means that if we fail to satisfy the interface we'll get an error in the file that needs fixing.
## Internationalisation
Boy that's a hard word to spell. Anyway, lazygit is translated into several languages within the pkg/i18n package. If you need to render text to the user, you should add a new field to the TranslationSet struct in `pkg/i18n/english.go` and add the actual content within the `EnglishTranslationSet()` method in the same file. Although it is appreciated if you translate the text into other languages, it's not expected of you (google translate will likely do a bad job anyway!).
The easiest way to debug lazygit is to have two terminal tabs open at once: one for running lazygit (via `go run main.go -debug` in the project root) and one for viewing lazygit's logs (which can be done via `go run main.go --logs` or just `lazygit --logs`).
From most places in the codebase you have access to a logger e.g. `gui.Log.Warn("blah")`
If you find that the existing logs are too noisy, you can set the log level with e.g. `LOG_LEVEL=warn go run main.go -debug` and then only use `Warn` logs yourself.
If you keep having to do some setup steps to reproduce an issue, read the Testing section below to see how to create an integration test by recording a lazygit session. It's pretty easy!
If you want to trigger a debug session from VSCode, you can use the following snippet. Note that the `console` key is, at the time of writing, still an experimental feature.
Lazygit has two kinds of tests: unit tests and integration tests. Unit tests go in files that end in `_test.go`, and are written in Go. Lazygit has its own integration test system where you can build a sandbox repo with a shell script, record yourself doing something, and commit the resulting repo snapshot. It's pretty damn cool! To learn more see [here](https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Integration_Tests.md)
Sometimes you will need to make a change in the gocui fork (https://github.com/jesseduffield/gocui). Gocui is the package responsible for rendering windows and handling user input. Here's the typical process to follow:
1. Make the changes in gocui inside the vendor directory so it's easy to test against lazygit
2. Copy the changes over to the actual gocui repo (clone it if you haven't already, and use the `awesome` branch, not `master`)
3. Raise a PR on the gocui repo with your changes
4. After that PR is merged, make a PR in lazygit bumping the gocui version. You can bump the version by running the following at the lazygit repo root:
