Author avatars

A commit list is a wall of names, and names are slow to scan. A picture next to each one turns "who wrote this" into something you answer by glance rather than by reading. Gitcito puts one on every author it shows: in the graph's author column, in commit details next to the author and each co-author, in the co-author picker while you compose, in the profile switcher, and beside each profile in Settings.

Where the picture comes from

Two sources, tried in that order:

The generated avatar is a small creature, not a coloured square: the same email always produces the same shape and the same colours, so an author stays recognisable across repositories and across restarts. Two different emails effectively never collide. It is drawn by blobatar (MIT), and it needs no network at all — a repository full of authors nobody has a Gravatar for still gets a full set of distinguishable faces, offline, on first paint.

Because the seed is the commit email, an author who commits under two addresses gets two avatars. That is deliberate — it is the same signal the graph's author column gives you, and it is usually how you notice a machine account or a misconfigured user.email. Fix it with author attributes if the two addresses really are one person.

The face in the title bar

The avatar next to your profile name is the one avatar in Gitcito that stands for you, in this repository, right now — so it is the only one that reacts to the repository's state. It pulls a face when something is up, and holds a neutral one the rest of the time.

What it reacts to, worst first: files left conflicted; a merge, rebase, cherry-pick or revert that git was never told how to finish; a detached HEAD — alarmed when there is uncommitted work under it, merely uncertain when there is not; commits piling up unpushed, or unpulled from the remote; changes piling up uncommitted; a stash drawer nobody opens; and a repository where nothing has landed in a month.

Worst wins: a repository with conflicts and forty unpushed commits wears the conflicts. Hover the avatar and the tooltip says exactly what caused the face — a picture that changes for an unstated reason is a puzzle, not a signal. The tooltip is the part to read; the face is only what makes you look.

The thresholds are deliberately high. A face that turns worried at one unpushed commit is worried permanently, and a permanent signal is one you learn to stop reading. A branch with no upstream stays neutral rather than content: "in sync" is not a claim that can be made about a branch nobody has pushed.

This is decoration, not instrumentation. The status bar carries the real counts, and it is the thing to trust. The face only ever says something is up at a glance.

Motion

The title-bar avatar breathes and blinks on its own. Turn it off at Settings → Themes → Graph → Animate the profile avatar — the expression still follows the repository, it just stops moving. Motion is also skipped automatically when your system asks for reduced motion.

Only this one avatar animates. An animated avatar has to be drawn as live SVG rather than a cached image, which is fine for one and wasteful for the several hundred a scrolling graph draws.

Turning the lookup off

Settings → Themes → Graph → Show avatars.

Off means:

• no request to gravatar.com, ever — not deferred, not cached-and-retried;
• avatars still appear, all of them generated locally.

So this is a privacy switch, not a "hide the pictures" switch. There is no setting that removes avatars entirely.

The limits

• A Gravatar lookup tells gravatar.com that this email was looked at. The hash is not a secret: anyone holding a candidate email can hash it and compare. If a repository's author list is something you would rather not hand to a third party, turn the lookup off before you open it.
• Only Gravatar. Avatars you uploaded to GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket are not read — those need an authenticated host API call per author, which is a lot of network for a decoration.
• No overrides. You cannot pin a chosen picture to an author, and you cannot swap the generated style. The avatar is a function of the email and nothing else.
• A Gravatar photo has no expression. If your profile email has one, the title bar shows the photo and no face — a photograph cannot pull a face at you. Turn the lookup off if you would rather have the expressive blob.
• The face follows the active repository only. On a tab that is not a repository there is nothing to react to, so it stays neutral.
• One reading at a time. The face shows the single worst thing it found, so a repository can be untidy in several ways and still wear one expression. It is not a status list — that is the status bar's job, and the tooltip's.
• Small is small. In the graph's author column the avatar is 16px, which carries colour and silhouette but not detail. Commit details draws the author at 38px, which is where you actually see the face.

See also: Themes & appearance · The commit graph · Author attributes · Profiles