Ghost Commit Player

Ghost Commit Player

Paste a public GitHub repository and the page fetches its recent commits and replays them as a silent film: each commit message becomes an intertitle, and between the cards the file tree is drawn as a treemap where new files fade in green, edited files pulse amber and deleted files fade out red. Blocks are grouped by directory and sized by lines (log scale), so a ten-thousand-line file does not swallow the frame. Scrub the bar, click a card on the film strip, or let it play at up to 8x.

The rate limit

Without a token GitHub allows 60 API requests an hour per IP. The commit list costs one request per hundred commits, the opening tree one more, and every commit whose file changes you want to see costs one request of its own; that is why only a chosen number of commits get details (sampled evenly, or the newest or oldest), and the rest appear as intertitles alone. Responses are cached in this tab, so reloading the same repo is free until the tab closes. A personal access token (no scopes needed for public repos) raises the limit to 5000 an hour.

Privacy

The token is kept only in this tab's sessionStorage and is sent only to api.github.com in the Authorization header; nothing else on this page or site ever sees it, and closing the tab forgets it. The page has no backend.

Keys

Data

Public data from the GitHub REST API; the demo reel is an invented repository. The projector borrows its vignette, flash cut and title card from this site's git film timeline toy (misc/08).

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