Lazygit and GPG#

Ever since I found out anyone can sign commits using anyone's email, I decided to use GPG for git development work, whether it's personal or professional, whether people appreciate it or not.

Some open-source projects these days require it, and I want to believe some companies have started to enforce this on their employees, with all the supply chain attacks and forms of compromise.

Thus, I have a whole section in my gitconfig file dedicated to GPG signing. And it let's me do cool things too.

Usually, there's a global key assigned in my $HOME/.gitconfig:

[user]
    email = <my_mail>
    name = <the name I want to see in my commits>
    signingkey = DEADB33FD34DB33f

In all git operations, this default configuration file is used. However, git allows local configurations, meaning users can set specific attributes for specific repositories. That said, I created a cute zsh alias called set_personal that I use to set a different signing key and email:

alias set_personal='git config --local user.signingkey PERSONALD34DB33F && git config --local user.email <another_email>'

Of course, more parameters could be configured this way but that's enough for me. This get's stored in <repo>/.git/config file and overrides the configuration from $HOME/.gitconfig.

Pretty neat.

But the problem came when I wanted to use Lazygit. I love the terminal and I think Lazygit is one of the best interfaces for Git. It's way prettier, cleaner and more intuitive than tig. I would like to find something similar to magit for neovim, but so far I never did.

The problem with Lazygit is that it fails to manage GPG signing. I've come across so many problems¹², it's not even funny. The latest time this happened it froze the gpg-agent and I could not even proceed manually, which is what I normally do.

And as opposed to what some issues in the repository mention, I don't think it's only on pinentry programs - I have experienced some issues, albeit less, on Linux environments.

Solution? Well, I only use lazygit now to do advanced adds - like when adding only a portion of changes as I always fail to use git add -p <file>. After that, I quit and proceed manually.

After coming across this³ post, I also felt less and less the need to use Lazygit. Especially the diff changes are astonishingly better.