forkgit

forkgit is a git wrapper that enables Fork to:

• open and interact with remote git checkouts over SSH
• set a custom .git directory for specific checkouts

Recent versions of Fork started accessing more of the files in the .git directory directly, making it impossible for forkgit to intervene. For this reason, it is recommended to use Fork 2.31.2 in combination with forkgit. You can rename this Fork.app to RemoteFork.app if you still want to use the most recent version of Fork local checkouts. Please note that application settings will be shared between these Fork versions, unless you edit Info.plist inside RemoteFork.app and change these entries:

• CFBundleName: Fork → RemoteFork
• CFBundleIdentifier and CFBundleURLName: com.DanPristupov.Fork → com.DanPristupov.RemoteFork

You need to sign the altered application bundle to be able to run it:

codesign --force --deep --sign - /Applications/RemoteFork.app

Known issues with remote checkouts:

• removing untracked files doesn't work
• interactive rebase is not working
• not tested at all on Windows and thus unlikely to work there

See also fork-dev/Tracker#929.

Remote checkouts

1. Clone this repository.

2. For each git checkout on the remote server, create a directory locally and create a file .forkgit inside with these contents (replacing values within <>):

   remote-host = <remote machine's hostname>
   remote-root = <absolute path to git checkout on the remote machine>
   

3. In the Fork Git preferences, add this repository's bin/git as a custom git instance.

4. Open the directories that represent the git checkouts on the remote machine in Fork.

To speed up interaction with remote checkouts, you can configure SSH multiplexing for the server. This involves setting ControlPath, ControlMaster and ControlPersist in your ~/.ssh/config for the host you're connecting to. See the OpenSSH Wikibook for more information.

Custom .git directory

This is useful when you want to track your dot-files in a git repository, but don't want command-line git to know that your home directory is a git checkout.

To set this up:

1. Run git init in your home directory.

2. Rename the generated .git directory to .dotfiles.git.

3. Create a .forkgit file in your home-directory with these contents:

   git-dir = .dotfiles.git
   

4. Open your home directory in Fork.

You will want to create a .gitignore file to ignore most of the files in your home directory to make this workable. For example:

*
!.*
!/.config/**/*
!/.ssh/config
.DS_Store
.bash_history
.cache/
.lesshst
.python_history
.viminfo
.wget-hsts
.zsh_history
.Xauthority