Hey Zach, i dont think this is possible today. Curious to hear your use case so i can best capture this as an enhancement request.

Screen Recording 2025-10-29 at 3.49.44 PM.mov

So I have this

gtls

command to basically do

gt ls

and let me select a branch in the stack with fzf, and when I select it with "enter", it checks out that branch (I've been using a command like this with regular git for many years)

I love the command

git diff --name-only $(gt parent)..HEAD

just to show which files differ from a branch to the parent

I want the preview window at the top of my command to show that: the files that changed between the parent and the upstack branch I'm selecting (so I can see "ah this is the PR where I changed x.js")

Pretty normal thing

I think it's weird that this isn't already supported tbh!

There are currently two options: •

gt info

and some bash scripting to extract the parent (appears in the output as

Parent: <branch>

- can use sed/awk etc. •

gt ls

and some bash scripting to find the parent (the one on the line after the line with the specified branch)

I think this is fine:

get_graphite_parent(){
    local specified_branch="$1"
    gt info --branch=$specified_branch --stat=true | grep "Parent:" | awk '{print $2}'
}

Most unix utils do exactly one thing and do it well and composably. I've noticed that most of the core graphite commands are not this way. They could certainly be built up from atomic pieces (like

get_graphite_parent <branch name>

would be), and maybe their implementations are, but those atomic pieces are not exposed to the user interface. I want to be good at using graphite and I'm finding it much more difficult than being good at other dev tools.

Look at this output from `gt info`:

branch-name-placeholder
38 minutes ago

PR #3299 (Draft) PR name from Graphite webapp
<https://app.graphite.dev/github/pr/><org>/<repo>/3299
Last submitted version: v31

Parent: parent-branch-name-placeholder
Children:

commit <commit hash>
Author: Zach Siegel <zsiegel@mycompany.com>
Date:   Wed Oct 29 10:08:09 2025 -0400

    ...a commit message from gt modify -cm 'messag'...
    ...a commit message from gt modify -cm 'messag'...
    ...a commit message from gt modify -cm 'messag'...

commit <commit hash>
Author: Zach Siegel <zsiegel@mycompany.com>

I think it's unlikely anyone will need this exact collection of random useful things frequently. If they need "all the info" they'll use the webapp; if they need something fine-grained (like git log or branch name) they'll use git directly. I don't think this command has good UX at all