gast

GitLab Activity Stream TUI — a terminal dashboard that mirrors your GitLab activity feed with live polling.

Features

• Live-updating feed of all GitLab project activity (pushes, merges, comments, issues, approvals)
• Color-coded events with per-author coloring
• Open events or projects directly in the browser
• @mention notifications (in-app badge + optional desktop alerts with sound and click-to-open)
• Filter by project or group
• Mouse and keyboard navigation

Desktop notifications (macOS)

Notifications require terminal-notifier:

brew install terminal-notifier

The gast configure wizard will offer to install it automatically when you enable notifications.

Install

Homebrew

brew install pataar/tap/gast

Go

go install github.com/pataar/gast@latest

Binary releases

Download pre-built binaries from the Releases page.

From source

git clone https://github.com/pataar/gast.git
cd gast
go build -o gast .

Quick start

Run the interactive configuration wizard:

gast configure

This prompts for your GitLab host, personal access token, poll interval, page size, full project path preference, and desktop notifications — validates everything (including a test API call) — and writes the config to ~/.config/gast/config.toml.

Then start the TUI:

gast

Configuration

Config file location: ~/.config/gast/config.toml (follows XDG Base Directory on Linux/macOS, %AppData% on Windows).

gitlab_host = "https://gitlab.example.com"
notifications = false
page_size = 50
poll_interval = "30s"
show_full_project_path = false
token = "glpat-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

The token needs the read_api scope (or api).

Environment variable overrides

Variable	Config key
GITLAB_ACTIVITY_HOST	gitlab_host
GITLAB_ACTIVITY_TOKEN	token
GITLAB_ACTIVITY_INTERVAL	poll_interval
GITLAB_ACTIVITY_PAGE_SIZE	page_size

CLI flags

--config             Path to config file
--host               GitLab host URL
--token              GitLab personal access token
--interval           Poll interval (e.g. 30s, 1m)
--full-project-path  Show full project path instead of short name
--project            Filter to projects matching these names (comma-separated)
--group              Filter to groups matching these prefixes (comma-separated)
--demo               Run with fake data (no GitLab connection)

Priority order: CLI flags > environment variables > config file > defaults.

Filtering

Show only events from specific projects or groups:

gast --project notification-service,dashboard
gast --group acme/backend

Projects match by substring, groups match by path prefix.

Keybindings

Key	Action
j / k	Select next / previous event
g / G	Select first / last event
o / Enter	Open selected event in browser
p	Open project page in browser
c	Clear events
r	Force refresh
t	Toggle relative / absolute timestamps
?	Toggle help
q / Ctrl+C	Quit

Mouse wheel scrolling is also supported.

Troubleshooting

Notifications not showing (macOS)

If you have notifications = true in your config but don't see desktop alerts:

1. Check notification permissions — Go to System Settings > Notifications > terminal-notifier and make sure the alert style is set to Banners or Alerts (not "None").
2. Check Focus mode — A Focus mode (Do Not Disturb, Work, etc.) may be suppressing notifications.
3. Verify terminal-notifier is installed — Run terminal-notifier -title test -message hello in your terminal. If the command is not found, install it with brew install terminal-notifier.

Notifications not showing (Linux)

Make sure notify-send is available (usually part of the libnotify package).

License

MIT