First run | GitLane

Open or clone a repository

On first launch GitLane asks for a repository. Point it at any folder inside a git worktree — it discovers the repository root from a subdirectory, so you don’t have to find the exact top level.

Each open repository gets its own tab, and your tabs are restored the next time you launch. Tabs can be renamed and grouped — see Name and group your repositories.

Read the graph

The center pane is the commit tree. Every line of history gets its own lane and colour. Branches, remotes, tags, stashes, and your uncommitted work all live in the same view — stashes sit at the point in history where you made them, and uncommitted changes float on top as a WIP row.

Name and group your repositories

Repository tabs are labeled by the folder they live in, which stops helping the moment two projects both have a frontend and a backend. Right-click any tab to fix that:

Rename… gives the repository a display name of your own — “Acme · frontend”. It replaces the folder name on the tab and in the Recent repositories list. “Use folder name” puts it back.
Assign to group puts the repository in a named, coloured group (“Acme”, “Personal”). A group’s tabs are drawn together behind its chip, so three repositories called frontend are told apart at a glance, and the recents list gets one section per group.

Right-click the group itself — its name in the strip, or its collapsed pill — for the actions that apply to the whole group: Collapse group, Rename group…, and Delete group. Deleting a group only removes the grouping; no repository, name, or tab goes with it.

A repository’s name and group cover its linked worktrees too — renaming from any of its tabs renames all of them, and a worktree’s entry in the recents list sits with the repository it belongs to.

Collapse a group you’re not working in

Double-click a group’s name to fold it down to a single pill showing its name and how many tabs it holds; double-click the pill to unfold it again. That reclaims the width of every project you’re not currently in.

A collapsed group never hides where you are: if it holds the repository you have open, that one tab stays drawn beside the pill and the rest fold away. Tab shortcuts follow what you can see: Cmd/Ctrl + 1–9 and the previous/next-tab shortcuts step through the tabs that are drawn and skip the folded ones. Collapsed groups are remembered between launches.

Both are local to this machine and to GitLane: nothing is written into the repository or its git config, and clearing the recents list doesn’t lose them. Assigning a group never reorders anything you dragged — the group’s tabs are simply drawn together, and removing the repository from the group puts its tab back where it was.

Set your commit identity

Before your first commit, it’s worth checking who GitLane will commit as. Open Settings → Identities.

GitLane keeps two things deliberately separate:

Accounts authenticate. They handle clone, fetch, pull, push, and pull-request API calls.
Identities author. An identity card is a name, an email, and an optional GPG/SSH signing key, applied to a repository’s local git config.

The practical payoff: you can’t accidentally commit to a client repository with your personal email, or push an unverified signature, because the identity is pinned per repository rather than inherited from whichever account you happen to be signed in as.

If you do nothing, GitLane commits as “this computer” — your global git config, exactly as a terminal would.

Connect a forge (optional)

To review pull requests in-app, sign in to your forge. GitHub goes through the gh CLI (including multiple accounts and GitHub Enterprise). GitLab works through glab or a personal access token; Bitbucket through an Atlassian API token; Cursor Origin through the origin CLI (origin auth login). Tokens GitLane owns are added in Settings → Accounts and stored in your OS keychain. Origin keeps its session in the CLI — GitLane never stores that token.