Question 1

What is gity, in one sentence?

Accepted Answer

gity is a small Rust daemon that watches your repo with OS-native file watchers and speaks Git's fsmonitor v2 protocol, so `git status` returns in milliseconds even in monorepos with millions of files.

Question 2

How is gity different from Git's built-in fsmonitor or `untrackedCache`?

Accepted Answer

Git's flags are necessary but insufficient: they speed up status, but they don't watch files in the background, don't cache results across processes, and don't run prefetch or maintenance. gity wraps all of that into one binary with one command.

Question 3

Do I need to change my Git workflow?

Accepted Answer

No. Run `gity register <path>` once. From then on, every `git status`, `git diff`, and IDE call gets accelerated transparently. No alias, no wrapper, no fork of Git.

Question 4

Is gity safe to leave running in the background?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The daemon is ~12 MB, idles under 0.1% CPU, and throttles itself when the system is under load. Resource ceilings (memory, file descriptors) are enforced per-repo.

Question 5

What does gity NOT do?

Accepted Answer

gity does not modify your Git history, does not upload anything to the cloud, and does not require admin privileges. It is a user-space daemon that talks to Git over a documented protocol.

Question 6

Is it really free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. gity is MIT-licensed, the source is on GitHub, and all distribution channels (crates.io, Homebrew, npm, PyPI, GitHub Releases) are free and use OIDC-based trusted publishing for supply-chain integrity.

Question 7

Which operating systems does gity support?

Accepted Answer

macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Linux (x86_64 and aarch64, glibc and musl), and Windows (x86_64). The same single binary works everywhere; there are no platform-specific configuration files.

Question 8

How do I install gity?

Accepted Answer

Pick your favourite package manager: `cargo install gity`, `brew install neul-labs/tap/gity`, `npm install -g gity-cli`, `pip install gity-cli`. Pre-built binaries (.deb, .pkg, .msi, .tar.gz) are also available on the GitHub releases page.

Question 9

How much speedup can I expect?

Accepted Answer

On repositories with 10,000+ tracked files we typically observe a 100x–500x speedup on `git status` once the cache is warm. The included `gity demo` command runs a side-by-side race against vanilla Git in your terminal so you can measure on your own machine.

Question 10

Does gity work with worktrees?

Accepted Answer

Yes. gity recognizes that multiple worktrees share the same underlying object store and replicates hot cache keys across them, so switching to a new feature branch is instant.

Question 11

How does gity work in CI?

Accepted Answer

Use `gity daemon oneshot <repo>` — it starts the daemon, services a single repo for the duration of your job, and shuts down cleanly. This is the recommended pattern for ephemeral CI runners where a long-lived daemon would be wasted.

Question 12

How do I check gity's health and resource usage?

Accepted Answer

`gity health <path>` shows watcher tokens, scheduler state, and the current resource budget for a single repo. `gity daemon metrics` prints aggregate daemon CPU, RSS, file descriptors, and cache hit rates across every registered repo.

Question 13

How can I verify the binary I downloaded?

Accepted Answer

Every release ships with a SLSA-style attestation. Run `gh attestation verify gity-0.1.2-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz --owner neul-labs` to confirm the binary was built by our GitHub Actions workflow and not tampered with downstream.

The questions developers ask, answered.

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Try gity on your biggest repo.