Git Tools

If you've been living under a rock, Sapling is the VCS Meta built to manage a monorepo so large it would crater regular git. The wild part: they open-sourced it, the desktop UI ships free, and it speaks to GitHub remotes natively.

The Setup

Install sl, clone a github repo, and start working. The mental model is closer to Mercurial than git — commits are first-class, branches are mostly invisible, and the smartlog tells you exactly where you are.

{`# install
brew install sapling

# clone a github repo with sl
sl clone https://github.com/aiden/aidxn-design
cd aidxn-design

# the killer command
sl smartlog`}

The Money Pattern

Smartlog is the feature you'll show your colleagues. It draws a clean ASCII tree of everything you're working on, what's pushed, what's stacked, and what's behind main. No more git log --graph --oneline --decorate incantations.

{`# pull rebase your stack on top of main
sl pull --rebase

# move to a commit by hash prefix
sl goto a3f

# amend the current commit and restack children
sl amend

# push the current stack as PRs
sl pr submit`}

The Catch

Sapling expects Meta-scale infrastructure to fully shine — virtual filesystem (EdenFS), Mononoke server, the works. On a normal GitHub repo you get the client experience, which is great, but the headline scale story isn't really yours. And the ecosystem of plugins is approximately zero.

The Verdict

For a solo dev shipping Astro 5 sites on Netlify, Sapling is overkill — but smartlog alone makes it worth a weekend. If you ever inherit a monorepo north of 10GB, you'll be glad you already know sl. Plot twist: the UI is genuinely good.