autowt 0.5.3

Customizable git worktree manager

autowt: a better git worktree experience

Full documentation

What are worktrees?

Worktrees are a built-in feature of git, which are essentially free clones of a local git repo. History is shared and synced across all worktrees for a given repo. Creating a new worktree is cheap, and you can list all your worktrees with a single command. This makes them a great fit for doing work “in parallel,” or not worrying about having uncommitted changes before working on another branch.

How autowt simplifies common workflows

While worktrees are powerful, the built-in tooling is minimalistic. Consider what it takes to set up a fresh worktree in a typical workflow:

1. Make a decision about where to put the worktree
2. git worktree add <worktree_path> -b <branch>
3. Open a new terminal tab
4. cd <worktree path>
5. uv sync or npm install or whatever your dependency setup is
6. cp <repo_dir>/.env . to copy secrets

Congrats, you're done! Type type type, open a PR, and merge it. Now you need to clean up:

1. git worktree rm .
2. Close the tab

On the other hand, with autowt, it looks like this:

autowt <branch>

And deleting branches that have been merged or are associated with closed PRs looks like this:

autowt cleanup

A lot nicer, right?

Now suppose your team uses an issue tracker like Linear which can suggest branch names based on issue IDs. You could configure autowt to have a custom command to automatically open worktrees for tickets instead of passing a branch name:

autowt linear ABC-1234 # opens yourname/abc-1234-title-of-the-ticket or whatever

What autowt can do for you

What autowt can do for you:

Getting started

You'll need Python 3.10+ and a version of git released less than ten years ago (2.5+).

First, install autowt:

pip install autowt

Then, make a new worktree for a new or existing branch in your current repo:

autowt my-new-feature

Watch as autowt creates a new worktree and opens it in a new terminal tab or window.

Contributing

PRs, GitHub issues, discussion topics, bring 'em on!

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.