Major change: Better integration with standard Git tooling. GitFourchette now uses git instead of libgit2 to edit repositories and communicate with remotes. This enables seamless integration into workflows that depend on OpenSSH, hooks, etc.
The Flatpak version (being prepared as of Sept. 8, 2025...) comes bundled with a Git distribution so you can use it without any additional setup. For more control, you can switch to your system's Git install via Settings → Git Integration.
New features:
- GPG-sign your commits. Look for a little key icon in the Commit Dialog. (#63)
- Verify commit signatures in the commit history. Settings → Commit History → Verify signed commits on the fly. (#59)
Quality of life improvements:
- Force push with lease (#61)
- Sidebar: Bold current commit and upstream (#60)
- Sidebar: Allow collapsing/expanding all folders from Local Branches context menu
- Keep syntax highlighting active while a search term is being highlighted
- In non-KDE environments (e.g. GNOME), the Return key can now be used to confirm most dialogs regardless of the focused widget (note: KDE already allowed this) (#68)
Bug fixes:
- Fix rendering of Unicode surrogate pairs in character-level diffs (#58)
- Fix parent commit links in Get Commit Info (regression in 1.4.0)
Breaking changes due to integration with Git tooling:
- Passphrase saving has been delegated to ssh-agent. Some Linux distros like Ubuntu and Fedora provide an ssh-agent out of the box. As a fallback, you can have GitFourchette spin up an ssh-agent for you via Settings → Git Integration → ssh-agent.
- Per-remote custom SSH keys aren't supported anymore. You can set per-host keys in ~/.ssh/config to achieve the same effect; or, you can set per-repo custom SSH keys in Repo → Repo Settings → Log in to SSH remotes with custom key file.
Note: Although many commands now call git, libgit2 (via pygit2) is still used internally to build a model of the repo.