Show HN: GWZ – Git Workspace Zone (multi-repo that feels like plain Git)

Coming from the land of the mono-repo (ex-googler), I decided to embrace the multi-repo, plain-git style. Methought, “hey, submodules, what could possibly go wrong”. Well, how about everything: detached HEADs, impossibly tedious commit management, and just about everything else. "OKAY" I said, a simple Python script should be fine, right? Well, NO. It turns out to be more complex. So I thought "others have got this, right? My time in mono-repo land was long and someone will have solved this" — well, yeah NAH. I won't bore you (the longer, boring comparison is in the docs) but everything I tried had baggage. All I want is a tool that gets out of my way and makes my multi-repo look like a mono-repo when I want, and a multi-repo when I want. I want my cake and I want it now.

"claude, codex and gemini, make me gwz" I said, "and make it work much like using git itself" I said — which they proceeded to ignore, but after many rounds in the rink, they produced a product which is delightfully good at the goal. I have to admit, the little beasties did take some creative license and made it better than I asked.

So what does gwz do?

- Member repositories remain ordinary Git repositories. No submodules unexpectedly detaching (unless you ask to materialize to a tag/snapshot). - “Snapshots” and “commit markers” can recover workspace state. That state lives in the root repo. - The similarities don't end at gwz being 3 letters starting with "g", no, gwz has status, diff, add, pull, push, commit, tag, stash, clone, init all play similar (not exact) roles to their git namesakes. - Extra commands to manage members: gwz repo create / clone / add / sync / detach / attach. - A “forall” command that runs anything across selected member repos.

Also, the member repos are hidden from the root repo's git (via .git/info/exclude), so you can't mess up the members from the root.

For my daily workflow gwz is great, and it's now my goto — I hardly use raw git anymore. But gwz, like any form of art, will never be finished. There's always more, but; it's now time to lift the veil, shine the light or yell from the rafters.

Caveats: it's written in Rust and I can't yet write Rust if my life depended on it. So why Rust and not Python or C++ (my usual gotos)? I have another project that needs to manage repos, which meant gwz had to be carved up into a CLI and a "core" crate with a typed protocol between them — so the engine is embeddable and wire-friendly, not fused to a terminal. That other project's target is also Rust, and (suspense) it's not ready to reveal, so: stay tuned.

The little LLM helpers created copious amounts of very fine documentation (seriously), which I invite you to peruse at: https://owebeeone.github.io/gwz-cli/

One interesting LLM initiated feature (I did not ask for it but it sounded good and it falls out as part of the gwz-core protocol anyway) is the “--json/jsonl” output which seems to give LLMs much better context of the response. Who woulda thunk, an LLM making its own lingo.

Honest state:

- It has a few rough UX edges, nothing so egregious it'll make you chunder. - Across gwz-core, gwz-cli and gwz-py, gwz currently has 764 tests, with roughly 82% line coverage. - For my workflow gwz is great. YMMV (tell me about it - good, bad or indifferent, Nah, scratch that, only the good). - gwz-dev - the root gwz repo is a “gwz managed” repo. Eat your own fishfood. - The CLI comes in Rust and Python variants. I use the Rust gwz daily; the Python gwz-py should work but gets less use, so it probably has bugs — it started life as a validation harness proving the core's message protocol holds up when driven from a second language. - It's v0.9.2 and pre-1.0: the protocol and some command surfaces may still move. - GPL-2.0-only, the same license family as git.