Using Kirbon with Git

Open the repository#

A Git repository is just a folder to Kirbon: open it with File ▸ Open Folder… and the Markdown inside becomes the page tree. Kirbon doesn’t need Git installed, and this version has no Git buttons — commit, pull, branch and review in the tool you already use.

Clean diffs#

Kirbon is built so that a commit shows only what you changed:

• Opening, reading and switching views never write to a file.
• An edit rewrites only the blocks you changed. Everything else — spacing, list markers, emphasis style, line endings, a missing final newline — is written back byte for byte.
• New blocks follow the style the file already uses: - or * bullets, backtick or tilde fences, LF or CRLF.
• Table edits rewrite only the edited cell, keeping the padding of the others.
• View settings — Page Width, frozen columns, code line numbers, outline state — are kept on your Mac, never in the files.

Pull, switch branches, merge#

When Git changes files under an open documentation, Kirbon notices by their content:

• the page tree updates — new, moved and deleted pages appear where they belong;
• an open page you haven’t edited reloads in place, with Updated from Disk;
• an open page you are editing pauses its autosave and offers Compare Versions… — see Saving and changes on disk.

Renames and moves#

Rename and move pages in Kirbon rather than with git mv: Kirbon rewrites the links to the page in every other page, and the page’s own relative links and image paths, in one step you can undo. Git sees a rename plus the link changes — easy to review in a pull request.

Looks the same on GitHub#

Kirbon writes CommonMark with GitHub Flavored Markdown: tables, task lists, strikethrough, and callouts as GitHub alerts (> [!NOTE]). Links are relative paths with .md, and heading anchors follow GitHub’s rules, so a link like release-checklist.md#on-release-day works in Kirbon and on GitHub.