Gunison is a new GUI (GTK 3) frontend for the Unison file synchronizer. Unison already has a built-in GTK 2 frontend, but Gunison is nicer and more convenient. Gunison works by wrapping Unison's console frontend in an expect-like fashion.
Caution: Although I use Gunison daily, it is less reliable than Unison itself (and will always be, if only because it parses Unison’s human-readable output). There are known bugs and probably unknown ones, too.
Gunison looks like this:
For comparison, the built-in unison-gtk2:
You need the unison program on your $PATH, and GTK 3 runtime
libraries installed in your system.
If you use SSH with passwords, you will also need an SSH_ASKPASS
program, because Gunison itself won't prompt you for the password. On Linux,
try installing ssh-askpass-gnome.
If you use Linux x86_64, try the pre-built binary.
On other platforms, or if the pre-built binary doesn't work, build from source.
You need Go 1.17+ and Git, as well as GTK 3 and the associated C toolchain.
go install github.com/vfaronov/gunison@latest will download and compile
Gunison and its dependencies, and install the gunison (or gunison.exe)
executable in $GOBIN. Alternatively, go install . in a source checkout.
Here's a complete recipe for Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install build-essential git libgtk-3-dev
wget https://golang.org/dl/go1.17.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf go1.17.linux-amd64.tar.gz
GOBIN=$PWD go/bin/go install -v github.com/vfaronov/gunison@latest
./gunison
Run gunison with the same command-line arguments as you would run unison
(they will be passed on). Unlike unison-gtk2, Gunison will not offer
to select a profile from the GUI: you must specify the profile or roots
on the command line.
Do not set preferences that affect Unison's console behavior, such as
terse or repeat. They may break Gunison.
It's best to set the diff preference to a GUI tool that produces no console
output, such as meld. Otherwise, diffs will be opened as temporary
files in your operating system, but loading large diffs may be slow.
Bring up the menu by right-clicking on the tree or pressing the Menu or Shift+F10 keys. This menu lets you set the action to be performed on items, as well as view differences between files. You can select multiple items or folders at once and operate on them all together.
Gunison remembers which directories you have collapsed in the tree — very
useful for .git directories, for example. But, this doesn’t distinguish
profiles or roots: if you collapse a Documents/work directory in one profile,
this may affect an unrelated Documents/work directory in another.
If the tree is too bushy for your liking, try enabling the Squash
single-item folders option in the menu. This will display dir1/file.txt
in one line when dir1 contains only file.txt.
By clicking on the column headers, you can sort items by path or action. Sorting by action in both directions (click twice) is a quick way to check if all actions are the same.
You can also rearrange and resize columns by dragging them, as usual. This will be remembered for subsequent runs.
There are currently no shortcuts specific to Gunison, but you can use the common GTK shortcuts, which by default are:
- - (minus) or Shift+Left to collapse a folder
- + (plus) to expand a folder, Shift+Right to expand with all its children
- Ctrl+F1 to toggle a tooltip with details for the selected item
- Menu or Shift+F10 to pop up the context menu
- mnemonics (underlined keys) to access buttons and menu entries, e.g. Alt+S for Sync
Gunison saves your UI options, as well as the list of collapsed directories,
to a file named state.json in a platform-dependent config directory —
usually ~/.config/gunison on Unix. You can edit this file by hand. Or,
by symlinking it do /dev/null, you can prevent Gunison from saving anything.