Tldr
Sapling's smartlog — your unpushed commits, drawn on top of the pushed base they fork from — is the view I missed most after leaving Meta. I wanted it back without switching version control systems, so I rebuilt it for plain Git: git-smartlog, one zsh script you drop on your PATH and run as git smartlog.
The question Git won't answer
Git is great at answering "what's the history of this branch?" and terrible at answering "what am I working on?" git log walks the whole history without ever telling you which commits are yours and unpushed. git branch lists names with no sense of how anything stacks. The picture I actually want — a dozen times a day — is just my local commits, sitting on the spot where they fork off origin/master, and nothing else.
I miss that picture because I used to have it. At Meta, Sapling was the version control I used every day, and its smartlog (sl) showed exactly this: draft commits on top of the nearest public base, with relative times, authors, and refs. After I left, sl was the habit that had nowhere to land. But I wasn't going to switch version control systems for one view.
So I rebuilt the view.
What it looks like
On a feature branch with a few local commits stacked on origin/master:
$ git smartlog
@ 23de132889 14 minutes ago junz
│ Wire backoff into the HTTP client
│
o a8d1958eb9 Today at 10:30 junz
│ Add exponential backoff with jitter
│
o 2d6999d80d Today at 08:05 junz
╭─╯ Extract retry policy into its own module
│
o 7582005a1c Yesterday at 16:45 junz origin/master
│ Bump dependencies
~@ is HEAD. The indented o nodes above the bend are my unpushed commits, newest first. Below the bend is the public base — the nearest pushed commit — and ~ is everything older, which I don't care about right now. One glance and I have the whole stack, where it forks off master, and how old each piece is.
There's also a -u flag that draws uncommitted changes as one more node on top of HEAD — git diff --stat, dressed up. Every file gets a one-letter marker for what happened to it (added, modified, deleted, renamed, untracked, and a few more), the rows are grouped and colored by that marker, and untracked files are folded in as if staged — against a throwaway index, so the real one is never touched. Sapling has no such node; the idea is borrowed from Jujutsu, which treats the working copy as a commit in its own right.
git smartlog -u — uncommitted work as one more node on top of the stack, grouped and colored by change kind.How I run it
I keep -u on by default — alias sl='git-smartlog -u' — so a dirty working tree always shows up as just another node on the stack.
That block earns its keep on its own, too: the same script, run as git smartstat, prints just it as a standalone command — one file answering to two names.
One file, on purpose
I had one firm constraint: the script depends on zsh and git, and nothing else — not even the rest of my dotfiles. That way I can scp it to any box, including the BusyBox NAS where installing anything is a chore, and it just runs. All the data comes out of a couple of git log format strings (%al for the author, %D for the refs); the rest — the bend, the colors, the layout — the script draws itself.
It also copies Sapling's output habits closely, so the view reads the same. Public commits authored by someone else render metadata-only — no author, no subject — which keeps shared-trunk history compact. Relative times follow Sapling's two-tier scheme: "14 minutes ago" under 90 minutes, then "Today at 10:30", "Yesterday", a weekday, and eventually a plain date. Run side by side with the real sl, the two match on both the rendered text and the raw escape codes.
What it doesn't do
One deliberate limitation: it draws the current branch's stack and nothing else. Sapling shows every draft branch in the repo at once, through a full DAG renderer; this script doesn't try. When you work one branch at a time — which is me, almost always — the output matches sl exactly.
The code isn't the point
Full disclosure: this is a vibe-coding project — an LLM wrote essentially all of the zsh, and most of this post. What's mine is the taste, the complaints, and the steady demand that it be funnier.
If you've ever lost track of which of your commits are pushed, or squinted at git log --graph looking for where your branch leaves master, this is the gap it fills — and it's a single file, one curl away (install and the sl alias are in the README). It's not a Sapling reimplementation — it's the two views I missed most, Sapling's smartlog and Jujutsu's take on the working copy, made to run anywhere Git does.