I used to live in VS Code with GitLens pinned — the branch graph, heat-mapped blame, the lens annotations. That was my git workflow.
Then 2026 happened. With Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex doing the actual editing, the editor itself became optional. The only thing dragging me back was GitLens.
That felt wasteful — booting an entire IDE just to peek at commit history. The agent runs the git commands now; I only need to sanity-check the result, occasionally, when something looks off.
So I built ** gitwink** — the smallest possible tool for
Read-only by design. It cannot commit, push, merge, or modify anything. If I need git surgery, I tell the agent.
agent commits → tray click → inline expand → "Copy as AI context"
→ paste into Claude/Codex/Cursor
→ "did the agent do this right?"
No window switching. No IDE boot. The whole loop fits inside a glance.
Ctrl+Shift+G
to summon from anywhere. Right-click the tray icon for Reset position / Open settings file / Quit.source
, Documents
, Projects
, Code
, Dev
, repos
, Desktop
, every non-system drive on Windows; ~/Projects
, ~/Code
, ~/Developer
on macOS) and caches the result in SQLite. No "add repo" friction.●
commit · ◆
merge · ★
tagged — and branch label badges when a commit isn't on the currently checked-out branch.+/−
line counts, bin
- size for binaries, GitLens-style filename emphasis.
c
key or button. Produces a markdown block with the commit, file list, and (if small enough) the full diff, ready to paste into Claude / Codex / Cursor.For the "wait, did the agent actually do that?" moments. Click any commit and a separate window opens — full file sidebar, side-by-side diff with synchronised scroll, inline image preview for binary assets, and a singleton that remembers position, size, and maximised state.
git2
No telemetry. No phone-home. The only network access is an opt-out update check.
Microsoft Store — gitwink on the Microsoft Store →. The Store build is signed by Microsoft during certification, so no SmartScreen prompt appears, and the Store owns updates.
WinGet:
winget install gitwink
Scoop:
scoop bucket add var-gg https://github.com/var-gg/scoop-bucket
scoop install gitwink
Scoop installs by extraction, so no SmartScreen prompt either. Update later with scoop update gitwink
.
Or grab the release directly — latest release on GitHub:
.exe
(NSIS installer) or .msi
.dmg
(universal)Direct downloads are currently unsigned (gitwink participates in the SignPath Foundation free code-signing program for OSS; the certificate will sign these artefacts once approved). The release notes have the SmartScreen / Gatekeeper bypass steps.
Building from source is straightforward — pnpm install && pnpm tauri dev
. Requires Node 20+, Rust stable (msvc toolchain on Windows), Visual C++ Build Tools or Xcode CLT.
v0.4 — usable, daily-driven. Cold-start friendly tray app.
Source on GitHub → (MIT licensed)
If the AI-agent workflow describes your week too, give it a wink. Feedback and issues welcome on GitHub.