New to Git

You don't need a second GitHub account for gitswitch to be worth installing. If this is your first repo, gitswitch is the fastest way to get git and GitHub actually working — no tutorials on SSH keys, no hand-editing .gitconfig.

What you'd normally have to do

Without gitswitch, a first-time setup usually looks like:

git config --global user.name  "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@example.com"
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub   # paste this into GitHub → Settings → SSH Keys

Four commands, one of which asks you to copy a public key into a web form by hand — and none of it explains what an SSH key even is.

What gitswitch does instead

gitswitch setup

Checks whether git and the GitHub CLI (gh) are on your machine. If either is missing, it shows you the exact install command and offers to run it for you:

✗  git not found

About to run: sudo apt install git
Proceed? [y/N]

Say yes, and it installs it. (On macOS, git itself comes from Apple's Xcode Command Line Tools — that one's a GUI prompt, so gitswitch shows you the command but doesn't drive the dialog for you. gh still installs itself the same way as everywhere else.)

Once git and gh are there:

gitswitch login

Opens GitHub in your browser (device flow — you type a short code, GitHub does the rest), then fills in your name, email, and GitHub account automatically:

✓  Logged in as yourname (github.com)
✓  Profile "yourname" created
✓  Token stored in keychain

That's it. git commit and git push now work, correctly attributed, with no SSH key you had to generate or paste anywhere.

You're done — but you're not stuck

If you ever do pick up a second account (a job, a client, an open-source project you contribute to), everything here already applies — see Multi-account GitHub. Nothing about starting with one account locks you out of adding a second later; there's no migration step.

Next

• Quick Start — the full command walkthrough
• Multi-account GitHub — when you add a second account
• Troubleshooting — if gitswitch setup can't find a package manager it recognizes