ghab

Browse GitHub like the website, in your terminal.

ghab is a TUI that treats github.com's mental model -- a repo page with tabs, a profile page with repos, links you follow -- as something a terminal can do better. Point it at any repo and you get the familiar layout: readme, code tree, releases, issues, and PRs, each a tab. Hit a username and you're on their profile, scrolling their repos, descending into any of them. The hop chains: repo -> owner -> another repo -> its owner, with esc walking back up the stack.

It is GitHub-first (remote browsing), not a local-git tool (that's lazygit) and not a work dashboard (that's gh-dash).

What it does

• Repo screen with five tabs -- readme (rendered through glamour), code (tree + syntax-highlighted file preview), releases (notes, assets, streaming download with the build for your machine marked), issues, and PRs.
• PR view -- conversation, files changed, per-file diffs with review threads anchored to their lines; plus a cross-repo "my PRs" screen (authored or review-requested, configurable query).
• Profile hop -- u from any repo ascends to the owner's profile; enter descends into any of their repos.
• Search -- ?query from the home screen searches repos.
• Clone -- c clones the current repo (via gh repo clone) into your configured clone directory.
• Open in editor -- e on any file in the code tab suspends the TUI into your editor of choice.
• Open on web -- o hands the current page to the browser when the terminal isn't enough after all.

Install

go install github.com/Sh-ui/ghab@latest

Requires Go 1.25+. Or clone and go build (the checked-in build.sh cross-compiles static binaries for macOS and Linux, amd64 and arm64, into dist/); prebuilt binaries, when published, appear on the releases page.

Auth

ghab rides your existing GitHub CLI login: it authenticates through go-gh, which resolves GH_TOKEN from the environment, then the token gh auth login already stored. ghab itself handles zero credentials -- nothing to configure, nothing new to store. If gh works, ghab works.

Usage

ghab                  home screen: recents + input
ghab owner/repo       jump straight into a repo
ghab --check-config   print the resolved config + warnings and exit
ghab --version        print version and exit

The home input takes owner/repo (open the repo), owner (open the profile), or ?query (search repos).

Default keys (all remappable in config):

key	action	key	action
enter	open	esc	back
h / l	prev / next tab	j / k	down / up
u	owner profile	c	clone
e	open in editor	o	open on web
s	search	r	refresh
ctrl+p	my PRs	?	help
q	quit

Config

Everything tunable lives in ~/.config/ghab/config.toml ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME respected). No file is required: every key has a compiled default, and invalid values fail soft -- a warning on stderr, the default kept. ghab --check-config is the validator: it prints the fully resolved config, where the palette came from, and every warning.

[palette]
# "auto" looks for ~/.config/ghab/ombre-palette.json (a JSON object of
# name -> "#hex"), else uses the compiled palette. Or an explicit path.
file = "auto"

[theme]
# Each slot takes a palette name, "#hex", or "ansi:N".
accent = "coffee"
accent_alt = "teal"
open_marker = "green"
closed_marker = "red"
release_tag = "yellow"
frame = "ansi:8"
selection_bg = "ansi:8"

[readme]
# Glamour stylesheets for the readme tab. "auto" looks for
# ~/.config/ghab/styles/readme-ombre-{dark,light}.json (the styles/
# directory in this repo ships a ready-made pair to copy there), else
# falls back to glamour's built-in style of the same mode.
style_dark = "auto"
style_light = "auto"
# "dark" or "light" pin the mode; "auto" reads the one-word file
# ~/.config/ghab/color-mode, so terminal theme switchers can flip it.
color_mode = "auto"

[behavior]
clone_dir = "~/Developer"
editor = "micro"
open_url = "auto"           # or an opener command
page_size = 30
cache_ttl = "5m"
diff_context_lines = 3
# String or array of strings; results merge and de-duplicate.
my_prs_query = ["is:pr is:open author:@me", "is:pr is:open review-requested:@me"]

[keys]
# Any of: quit help search back tab_next tab_prev down up open
# profile clone edit web refresh my_prs
quit = "q"

Status

Honest state of things: ghab is a personal tool, extracted from the monorepo it grew up in and published because it turned out genuinely useful. It is used daily on macOS and linux-arm64 terminals; build, vet, and tests (including -race) are green, and the config surface is validated by --check-config. It is not 1.0: expect rough edges in less-traveled corners (huge monorepos truncate the code tree to lazy per-directory loading, exotic diffs may render imperfectly), and the UI is keyboard-only by design. Issues and PRs welcome.

The original build spec lives in docs/BUILD.md -- it documents the architecture and milestones as they were built, and is kept as a design record rather than current-state docs; where it and this README disagree, the README wins.

License

MIT, (c) Ian Schuepbach.