Alter

One-liner tool for switching Git identities and credentials.

Why this tool?

Managing multiple Git accounts often requires switching user.name, user.email, GPG signing keys, and credential.namespace. Doing this manually with git config is repetitive and doesn’t scale well—especially when you work across personal and organizational projects.

Alter was built to make this workflow smoother.

• Each Git identity (username, email, GPG key, credential namespace) is stored as an isolated profile
• You can switch identities with a single, consistent command
• Project-specific setups can be applied cleanly with --local

The tool originally started as a personal project written in another language. It was later rewritten in Rust, not only for performance, but also because of Rust’s strong Git-related ecosystem—especially crates like gix_config from the gitoxide project. This ecosystem made Rust a natural fit for building a fast, reliable identity-switching tool.

Install

Cargo

cargo install alter

Arch Linux (AUR)

paru -S alter

Usage

Create a new profile

alter new

Delete a profile

alter delete <slug>

Switch to a profile

alter use <slug> [--local]

List available profiles

alter list

License

MIT