lazygit/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

The short version

This project does not accept pull requests. Don't bother making one, it won't be merged.

However, there are other forms of contributions that are very welcome and encouraged; see below for what those are.

Why no PRs?

There are two main reasons for this, and I want to be very honest about them:

• I am maintaining lazygit for fun, as a hobby in my free time (which is quite limited). I'd like to spend my free time on things that I enjoy doing. I enjoy working on lazygit's code and improving it myself; I don't enjoy reviewing PRs. It's that simple, really. Reviewing PRs takes a lot of time; time that I would rather spend on developing lazygit myself.
• Even if I had the time and inclination to review PRs, this has become quite difficult today: most PRs nowadays are AI-generated to some extent (often completely), which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; I heavily use AI myself these days, and I get great results from it. However, agentic coding needs to be guided by humans so that the results are good, and for contributed PRs I can't tell to what extent the human contributor did this, or is even capable of it; and I don't want to do the work of guiding a contributor's coding agent. If I post PR review feedback and have to suspect that the contributor simply passes it on to their coding agent, then that is a work mode that doesn't make sense to me, and I would rather just drive my own agent to do the work.

Why it might still make sense to post a PR

I can think of two such reasons:

• You implemented a lazygit improvement that you want to use yourself; in this case it could make sense to let others merge this change into their forks if they find it useful too. And if enough people say they want the feature, this can persuade me to add it, so putting it out there to give it visibility can be helpful.
• You posted an issue for a feature request, and have a prototype that implements it; it could be useful to publish the branch as a draft PR to better illustrate how the feature works.

For this reason I usually don't close pull requests to give them more visibility. Just don't expect your PR to be merged.

So how can I contribute then?

There are other forms of contributions to a project besides source code that are very welcome and encouraged; for instance:

• File issues for bugs that you find, and I'll do my best to take care of fixing them (if they are important enough).
• File feature requests for new functionality that you want to see in lazygit. I have a lot of ideas for future improvement myself, but I have also implemented a lot of feature ideas that weren't mine, and I'm grateful for those ideas. (Of course, there are also lots of feature requests that I don't implement, so don't be disappointed if I don't jump on yours.)
• Help make other people's bug reports reproducible. Sometimes people report bugs that they have only seen once, and in such a case it can be helpful to come up with reproducible scenarios.
• Help complete or improve the translation into other languages; join https://crowdin.com/project/lazygit for that.
• Run a master build! This is probably the most valuable way to help me. Test the latest master not just by occasionally trying it, but by actually using it for your daily work; report any issues that you find. This will help prevent having to release hotfix updates for regressions that are only noticed by users updating to a new release.

Importantly, if you file issues (whether bug reports or feature requests), stay around to answer questions and discuss your issue. There are few things that I find more annoying than spending time on responding to someone's issue (sometimes even making a PR that addresses it), and to then never hear from the OP again. So please set up your Github notifications so that you see when there's activity on your issue, and continue to participate.