[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNavnhzZHtk) walks through the process of adding a small feature to lazygit. If you have no idea where to start, watching that video is a good first step.
Please do not raise pull request from your fork's master branch: make a feature branch instead. Lazygit maintainers will sometimes push changes to your branch when reviewing a PR and we often can't do this if you use your master branch.
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.
If you want to spare yourself the hassle of setting up your dev environment yourself (i.e. installing Go, extensions, and extra tools), you can run the Lazygit code in a VSCode dev container like so:
If you want to start contributing to Lazygit with the click of a button, you can open the lazygit codebase in a Codespace. First fork the repo, then click to create a codespace:
This allows you to contribute to Lazygit without needing to install anything on your local machine. The Codespace has all the necessary tools and extensions pre-installed.
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.
To check code formatting [gofumpt](https://pkg.go.dev/mvdan.cc/gofumpt#section-readme) (which is a bit stricter than [gofmt](https://pkg.go.dev/cmd/gofmt)) is used.
VSCode will format the code correctly if you tell the Go extension to use `gofumpt` via your [`settings.json`](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/settings#_settingsjson)
by setting [`formatting.gofumpt`](https://github.com/golang/tools/blob/master/gopls/doc/settings.md#gofumpt-bool) to `true`:
Lazygit supports [Nerd Fonts](https://www.nerdfonts.com) to render certain icons. Sometimes we use some of these icons verbatim in string literals in the code (mainly in tests), so you need to set your development environment to use a nerd font to see these.
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. Then you can access via `gui.Tr.YourNewText` (or `self.c.Tr.YourNewText`, etc). 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!).
Note, we use 'Sentence case' for everything (so no 'Title Case' or 'whatever-it's-called-when-there's-no-capital-letters-case')
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`).
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 need to log from code in the vendor directory (e.g. the `gocui` package), you won't have access to the logger, but you can easily add logging support by setting the `LAZYGIT_LOG_PATH` environment variable and using `logs.Global.Warn("blah")`. This is a global logger that's only intended for development purposes.
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. For integration tests, see [here](https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/pkg/integration/README.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:
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:
[Lazycore](https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazycore) is a repo containing shared functionality between lazygit and lazydocker. Sometimes you will need to make a change to that repo and import the changes into lazygit. Similar to updating Gocui, here's what you do:
1. Make the changes in lazycore inside lazygit's vendor directory so it's easy to test against lazygit
2. Copy the changes over to the actual lazycore repo (clone it if you haven't already, and use the `master` branch)
3. Raise a PR on the lazycore repo with your changes
4. After that PR is merged, make a PR in lazygit bumping the lazycore version. You can bump the version by running the following at the lazygit repo root:
