---
title: "The commit graph"
description: "How to read GitLane's swimlane commit tree."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.gitlane.space/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# The commit graph

![The GitLane swimlane commit graph](/screenshots/hero-graph.png)

Every line of history gets its own lane and its own colour. That's the whole
premise: instead of one tangled column, each concurrent line of development
is a visually distinct swimlane you can follow with your eye.

## What's in the view

Branches, remotes, tags, stashes, and your uncommitted work all live in the
same tree rather than in separate panes:

- **Stashes** appear at the point in history where you made them, not in a
  detached list.
- **Uncommitted changes** float on top as a WIP row.
- **Commit nodes** show author avatars, with badges for co-authors and for
  commits made by bots and AI agents — Claude, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and
  Dependabot are recognised.

## Selecting commits

Click a commit to inspect it. Two modifiers extend the selection:

| Action | Result |
| --- | --- |
| Click | Select one commit |
| <kbd>Shift</kbd> + click | Select the range between the two |
| <kbd>Cmd/Ctrl</kbd> + click | Add or remove one commit from the selection |

A multi-commit selection is what powers combined-diff review and squashing —
see [Staging and committing](/guides/staging-and-committing) and
[Branch operations](/guides/branch-operations).

## Why it stays fast

The layout is computed in Rust. A topological walk over the commit DAG
assigns each commit a lane through a reservation scheme, and the result is a
plain list of `(row, lane, colour)` coordinates plus edges. The frontend is a
dumb painter: it draws those coordinates onto a `<canvas>`, which keeps
redraws cheap at thousands of rows where DOM or SVG nodes would not be.

The list is also virtualized — only the rows in the viewport (plus a small
overscan) exist at any moment, and the canvas backing store is bounded to
match.

The practical result: histories with thousands of commits scroll smoothly,
and paging in more history is incremental rather than a full reload.

## It updates itself

A filesystem watcher watches the open worktree recursively, including `.git`
— so commits, checkouts, and staging you do in a terminal all register.
Bursts of events are throttled so a busy rebase doesn't thrash the UI, then
the view quietly re-syncs.

> **Tip**
>
> This is why there's no refresh button. If you switch branches in a
> terminal, the graph follows within a fraction of a second.

## Getting around

Jumping to a specific ref or commit is covered in [Search](/guides/search) —
incremental highlighting for what's on screen, full-repository search for
what isn't, and the branch navigator
(<kbd>Cmd/Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Alt</kbd> + <kbd>F</kbd>) for refs.

Source: https://docs.gitlane.space/guides/commit-graph/index.mdx