Gitforest

Overview

Gitforest is a terminal UI for managing many Git repositories at once. It scans configured directories for git repos, non-git projects, and submodules; surfaces uncommitted changes and unpushed/unpulled commits at a glance; and lets me run pull, push, fetch, or gh-driven GitHub operations across one repo or a whole selection without leaving the terminal.

I built it because I work across a ~/projects folder with dozens of repos plus a dotfiles tree of submodules, and “is everything pushed?” was a question I kept answering by cd-ing through directories. Gitforest answers it on one screen.

Features

Project discovery

Configured directories are scanned with bounded depth and a concurrency limit. Gitforest recognizes git repos via .git, submodules via .gitmodules, and non-git projects via marker files (package.json, Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, go.mod, Gemfile, pom.xml, build.gradle, and others) so I can spot folders that should probably be repos but aren’t yet.

Status dashboard

For every git repo, the list shows:

Clean / dirty working tree
Number of unpushed and unpulled commits relative to the upstream
Submodule indicator
Last activity timestamp for sorting

Sort by name, status, or last activity; filter with / and a free-text query.

Batch git operations

Multi-select with space (or a to select all), then run an operation across the whole selection:

p push, P pull, f fetch
i initialize git in selected non-git projects
c create a GitHub repo for selected directories (default visibility configurable)
A archive a GitHub repo

Push and pull are parallelized with backpressure; results stream back into the dashboard as they finish.

Background sync

A worker fetches remotes every five minutes so the unpushed/unpulled counters stay roughly current without me hammering f myself.

Caching

A local SQLite database (via Drizzle) caches the last scan result, so subsequent runs render instantly and only re-stat the directories that changed.

Configuration

~/.config/gitforest/config.yaml controls which directories to scan and how:

yaml

directories:
  - path: ~/projects
    maxDepth: 2
    label: Projects
  - path: ~/.dotfiles
    maxDepth: 3
    label: Dotfiles

scan:
  ignore: [node_modules, .git, vendor]
  concurrency: 5

github:
  defaultVisibility: private

display:
  sortBy: status
  sortDirection: desc

gitforest --init writes a starter file the first time.

Quick start

bash

# Run without installing
bunx gitforest --init
bunx gitforest

# Or install globally
bun add -g gitforest
gitforest

Technology stack

TypeScript on the Bun runtime, distributed on npm as gitforest
Ink for the terminal UI. React is rendered into a TTY
@inkjs/ui and ink-select-input for higher-level components
Bun.$ for git shell operations, the gh CLI for GitHub operations
Drizzle ORM over SQLite for the scan cache
Zod for config validation, YAML for the config file format