A featherweight Git companion that sits beside your AI coding editor and gives you the commit, diff, and worktree review surface those editors treat as an afterthought. Read-first and beautiful: open any folder and instantly see the graph, diffs, stash, status, and every in-flight worktree, refreshing live as the agent changes things under you. Make small fixes inline, and use whatever AI agent you already run for commit messages and PR drafts. Genuinely free, no subscription, no vendor-locked AI.
Working name. Easy to rename before the first public push.
AI coding editors (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and the rest) pour everything into the chat-and-agent loop and treat git review as a cramped side panel. But the agent generates a huge volume of diffs and commits fast, so the thing you most need is a great surface to see and review what it did. The tool creating the most diffs has the worst diff UX. Grove is the editor-agnostic companion that fills that gap: it works beside any agent, including several at once.
The wider Git GUI space is also crowded, yet the genuinely-free, genuinely-beautiful slice is nearly empty:
- GitKraken: paid (~$48/yr), AI is their own paid model, locked in.
- Tower: paid (~$69-99/yr).
- Fork / Sublime Merge: one-time paid, "free" only via a permanent nag.
- GitHub Desktop: free but feature-thin (no rich graph, no real blame).
- GitButler: free and excellent, but source-available with a no-compete license, and built around its own virtual-branches model.
Grove's wedge is the combination almost nobody does well:
- Worktree-first. Most clients ignore worktrees, yet parallel agents and one-worktree-per-task workflows are fast becoming how people run multiple agents at once. Grove makes the worktree dashboard a hero surface.
- Read-first, edit-light. Open any folder and instantly get a gorgeous graph, blame, stash, and status. Make small fixes inline. It does not try to replace your editor.
- Bring your own agent. Use the local
claude/codex/aiderCLI you already have authenticated, or paste an API key. We never lock you into a paid in-house model.
Alpha — the v0 hero features have shipped. As of v0.1.3-alpha (Windows x64 installers on the releases page):
- Commit graph with a live WIP node, virtualized for large repos, with hover cards on commit nodes (message, refs, author, copyable SHA)
- Working changes: stage / unstage, commit, generate a message with your local agent
- Worktrees view
- Syntax-highlighted diff review with Ctrl+F find inside the expanded diff
- One spotlight search (Ctrl+K) across projects, files, commits, branches, and content
- Live refresh tuned to ignore build/dependency noise and defer while you scroll
- Persistent navigation hub with browser-style back / forward history
Windows only for now; installers are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn. See DESIGN.md for the architecture and decisions.
Prerequisites: Rust, Node 18+ (Node 22.12+ recommended), and on Windows the MSVC C++ build tools plus the WebView2 runtime.
npm install
npm run tauri dev
The first Rust build compiles Tauri and gix and takes several minutes; later builds are incremental.
- Shell: Tauri (Rust core + web frontend, small binaries)
- Frontend: Svelte
- Git engine: hybrid -
gix(gitoxide) for fast reads, the user'sgitCLI for writes and not-yet-covered operations - Commit graph: custom canvas/SVG renderer (the look is the point)
- Quick edits: Monaco, scoped to small fixes only
- Agent layer: one interface, two backends (local CLI + bring-your-own API key)
GPL-3.0. Free as in actually free, and forks stay open.
Built by capad. Questions or feedback: oss@capad.fyi.