Keep

A Git GUI client inspired by Tower, built with Electron.

Download

Always the latest release:

Or browse all releases. No Linux download — build that one.

Or build it yourself

The macOS builds are signed and notarized. The Windows installer is not, so SmartScreen warns on first run. To skip that, or to run Keep on Linux, build it:

git clone https://github.com/yarism/keep.git
cd keep
npm install
npm run dist          # macOS .dmg — or dist:win, or dist:linux

The installer lands in dist/. A local build has no quarantine flag, so neither warning appears.

Features

• Visual working copy with staged/unstaged changes
• Inline diffs with hunk-level staging and discarding
• Commit history browser with a commit graph, full details and changesets
• Local vs remote at a glance — ahead/behind counts on branches and on the Pull and Push buttons, and unpushed commits drawn as hollow nodes
• History scoped to one branch or to every branch at once
• Commit subjects and descriptions, amending, and publishing a new branch
• Conflict handling — merge and rebase state, per-file resolution, abort
• Branch management — create, rename, delete, checkout
• Remote branches visible under each remote
• Stash support — save, apply, drop
• Merge, rebase, cherry-pick, and revert operations
• Removing the last commit, or resetting a branch back to an earlier one, with the changes kept as uncommitted work
• Tag creation
• Multi-repository support
• Detached HEAD state handling
• Context menus throughout (right-click on branches, commits, files)
• Open pull requests from GitHub, listed and reviewed in place — each one's description, commits and full diff, read from the local repository rather than the API
• Review comments shown inline on the diff line they were left on; draft your own on any line and submit them together as Approve, Request changes or Comment. Drafts survive a quit and nothing reaches GitHub until you submit
• Links out to GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket — open a pull request from a branch, or view a branch or commit on the web, straight from the context menu
• Seven colour themes, switchable from the toolbar
• Progress and results reported for every toolbar command
• System notifications for what finishes while Keep is in the background: pulls, pushes, releases, GitHub builds, and the moment your branch falls behind its upstream
• Keep Chess: the whole world plays one game, and a commit buys one move

Fetching

Keep fetches in the background every five minutes, and again the moment the window comes back to front (at most once a minute), so the ahead/behind counts mean something without you pressing Fetch first. Fetches prune, so a branch deleted on the remote (a merged PR, usually) disappears from the sidebar instead of lingering. The working copy and your local branches are never touched, only the remote-tracking refs, and it all runs non-interactively, so a repository that would ask for a password is skipped rather than left hanging. The Fetch button's tooltip says when the last one got through.

To change the interval, or switch it off, set autoFetchMinutes in settings.json (0 disables it). The file lives in Electron's user-data directory — ~/Library/Application Support/Keep on macOS.

Notifications

What finishes while Keep is in the background arrives as a system notification: a pull or push you started, a release command, the GitHub build it set off, and the moment a background fetch first finds new commits on your branch's upstream. While the window is front, nothing is posted; the toasts, badges and the build card already say it, closer to the work. Clicking a notification brings Keep back.

Falling behind notifies once, not once per commit: the first new commits are news, and the ones that pile on after them are not. Pull, and the next arrival is news again.

macOS asks whether to allow Keep's notifications the first time one is posted, not at launch, and the answer can be changed any time in System Settings, under Notifications. To turn the feature off in Keep itself, set notifications to false in settings.json (the same file as above).

Keep Chess

Everyone running Keep shares one game of chess. After a commit, the current position appears; you play one move, for whichever side is to move, and the next move belongs to whoever commits next, anywhere in the world. The game lives at yarism/keep-chess: each move is an issue that the repository's referee Action validates and commits, so the game's history is a git log and every move is credited to its player.

Reading the board needs nothing. Playing a move opens an issue under your name, which needs a GitHub token; Keep reads whatever your git credential helper or the GitHub CLI already holds (gh auth login is the quickest way to have one found), and never stores it. If no token turns up, the Play button explains instead of playing.

Not everyone wants a chess board after every commit: "Never show again" in the overlay turns it off, which is stored as "chess": false in settings.json (the same file as above). Delete the line, or set it to true, to rejoin the game. chessRepo ("owner/repo") points Keep at a different game, if a fork of the world is more your speed.

Themes

Click the palette button at the right of the toolbar to switch themes. The popover is a short, fixed list — following the system appearance, then four themes, plus whichever one is in force if it is not among them — with More themes at the bottom opening a gallery of all of them, each shown as a small mock of the window rather than a strip of colours. Nothing changes as the pointer passes over a theme: clicking is what tries it, in both places, and it applies straight away. The gallery stays open when you click so you can try the next one; the popover closes, having only the one row to give. The choice is remembered between launches.

A theme is just a map of CSS custom properties in renderer/themes.js — no colour is written literally in styles.css, so adding one means adding an entry to that file and nothing else. It lands in the gallery, not the popover, so the toolbar menu stays the same length however many themes there are. test/theme.test.mjs enforces both halves of that rule.

Requirements

• Node.js (v18 or later)
• Git installed and available in your PATH

Getting Started

1. Clone and install

git clone https://github.com/yarism/keep.git
cd keep
npm install

2. Run in development mode

npm start

3. Build distributables

# macOS (.dmg)
npm run dist

# Windows (.exe installer)
npm run dist:win

# Linux (.AppImage)
npm run dist:linux

# All platforms
npm run dist:all

Output goes to the dist/ folder.

Releasing

One command:

npm version patch   # 1.0.0 -> 1.0.1  a fix
npm version minor   # 1.0.0 -> 1.1.0  a new feature
npm version major   # 1.0.0 -> 2.0.0  a breaking change

Tests run first and abort on failure, then the version is bumped, committed, tagged and pushed. GitHub Actions builds on macOS and Windows runners and publishes the release itself, with notes from the commits since the last tag. Nothing to approve — the links above point at it a few minutes later.

Pushes to main build the same installers as workflow artifacts without releasing them.

Updating

Installed copies update themselves from those same releases, so a new version is not a trip back to this page. Keep checks a few seconds after launch and every six hours it stays open, downloads anything newer in the background, and puts a strip above the workspace when it is ready: Restart to Update. Ignoring the strip costs nothing — the update installs the next time Keep quits. Keep → Check for Updates… asks on demand, and is the only path that says anything when the answer is no.

Three things have to be true for that to work, and all three are configured:

• macOS builds a .zip as well as the .dmg, because Squirrel.Mac — the updater underneath — cannot read a DMG. The DMG is still what a first-time download gets.
• The release carries latest-mac.yml / latest.yml next to the installers. That file is the update feed; without it the app finds a release and nothing to compare against. The .blockmap beside it is why a patch release usually transfers a fraction of the app rather than all 110 MB.
• The two macOS arches are declared per target in package.json, never as --arm64 --x64 on the command line. Flags split the build into a run per arch, and each run overwrites the previous one's latest-mac.yml, leaving a feed that names one arch and an updater that finds nothing on the other. The release looks complete either way, which is what makes it worth a test.
• macOS refuses to install an update that is not signed by the same Developer ID as the running app, so this depends on the certificate below.

Windows updates work the same way but are unsigned, so each one shows a SmartScreen warning. Releases from v1.0.8 and earlier have no feed file and cannot be updated from — that generation has to be replaced by hand, once.

Signing

macOS builds are signed and notarized in CI from five repository secrets:

Without MAC_CERT_P12 a tagged build fails instead of shipping a DMG macOS refuses to open. Windows installers are still unsigned.

Installing Without Terminal

macOS

1. Double-click the .dmg to mount it
2. Drag Keep into your Applications folder
3. Open it — the builds are signed and notarized, so Gatekeeper stays quiet

Windows

1. Run the .exe installer
2. The installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen warns — More info → Run anyway
3. Follow the setup wizard, then launch Keep from the Start Menu

Linux

1. Make the .AppImage executable: chmod +x Keep-*.AppImage
2. Double-click it or run it from the terminal

Project Structure

keep/
├── main.js              # Electron main process
├── preload.js           # IPC bridge between main and renderer
├── git.js               # All git operations (child_process)
├── renderer/
│   ├── index.html       # App shell
│   ├── app.js           # App initialization and navigation
│   ├── styles.css       # All styles (colours come from themes.js)
│   ├── themes.js        # Colour themes as CSS custom property maps
│   ├── icons.js         # The app's icon set
│   ├── git-output.js    # Turns raw git output into a readable line or two
│   └── modules/
│       ├── state.js         # Shared state and DOM helpers
│       ├── working-copy.js  # Working copy / staging view
│       ├── history.js       # Commit history view
│       ├── sidebar.js       # Sidebar (branches, tags, remotes)
│       ├── context-menu.js  # Right-click context menus
│       ├── diff.js          # Diff rendering
│       ├── modal.js         # Modal dialogs
│       ├── theme.js         # Theme switching and the picker
│       ├── toast.js         # Transient status messages
│       └── repos.js         # Repository list management
├── assets/
│   ├── icon.icns        # macOS app icon
│   ├── icon.png         # App icon (1024x1024)
│   └── icon.svg         # Icon source
└── package.json

License

ISC, see LICENSE.