Introduction

Git Manager is a free, open-source Git client for macOS. It runs entirely on your machine: no account, no cloud backend, no telemetry. The only things it ever talks to are the AI provider you configure yourself — a local Ollama by default — and GitHub, when you ask it to.

This site documents what each part of the app does and how to drive it.

What this is, and is not

It is a reference for the app: one page per area of the interface, each explaining what you are looking at, what you can do from it, and what happens when you do.

It is not a Git tutorial. The pages assume you know roughly what a commit, a branch and a merge are, and explain what Git Manager does with them. Where the app's behaviour differs from raw git — the merge editor, the undo history, the staging model — the page says so, because that is exactly where knowing Git is not enough.

How to read it

The sidebar follows what you are trying to do rather than the app's menus:

• The interface — the window's fixed landmarks: tabs, toolbar, footer, sidebar, and the helpers reachable from anywhere (palette, notifications).
• Reading your repository — the commit graph, the view every repository opens on, and how to inspect a single commit from it.
• Making changes — the staging panel: choosing what goes into the next commit, and reviewing it before you do.
• When Git gets in the way — resolving a conflict in the three-way editor.

Further down come the layers around that core: branches and stashes, remotes, the toolbox (bisect, patches, the built-in terminal), the AI features, the Launchpad, the achievements you can unlock, and a debugging corner for when something misbehaves.

Every page has the same shape: an explanation of the feature, a screenshot of it, the steps to perform it, and what you should see afterwards.

Don't have it yet?

Download & install Git Manager first, then come back — every page below assumes the app is already open.

Already installed?

Start with your first repository to get something open, then the commit graph — it is where every repository opens, and the entry point to everything else.

Why the screenshots can be trusted

Documentation screenshots normally rot: someone changes the UI, and the picture in the docs quietly keeps showing last year's app. These cannot, because nobody takes them by hand.

Every picture here is exported by an end-to-end test driving the real macOS app against a scripted repository. The steps listed under each screenshot are that test's own steps. If a feature stops working the way a page describes it, the test that produced the page fails.

The prose is the opposite — it needs intent a test cannot state, so it is written by a human, reviewed, and committed next to the scenario it describes. A model may draft it; what ships is what someone edited and approved. No model runs when the site is built.

If a page ever contradicts the app, the page is the bug — use the Report a documentation issue link at the bottom of any page to say where.

What is not covered yet

Where the notification card lands on a second display. The card that slides down from the top of the screen is positioned against the camera housing of a MacBook's built-in display, from measurements the app asks macOS for. Those measurements have only ever been checked on one machine. On a Mac without a notch, or on an external monitor, the app falls back to default measurements — and that fallback has not been verified on real hardware, so the card may sit a few points off where it should.

This is cosmetic. Nothing about what a notification says or does depends on it, and a card that cannot be measured is still shown. If you see one land somewhere obviously wrong, the Report a documentation issue link takes you to the right place to say so — including which Mac and which display.