parallelist

Working across a few large repositories tends to mean dozens of branches at a time and several shells open, each busy with a different task, and more and more of them running a program that works on its own for a while and then needs an answer. Machine time and disk space are cheap, but your attention is not. It should go to the decisions: answering that question, looking over a result, starting a branch or finishing one. The rest is finding the right terminal window, editor or browser tab, remembering where things were, waiting for a clone, and wondering which of app, app-1234-fix-header and app-b is merged and safe to delete.

parallelist is an attempt to keep that attention for the decisions. It puts the projects, their branches, the workspaces holding them and the shells running there in a single window, tries to show only what actually needs you, and gets you there in a keystroke. It also tries not to pull you away from whatever you're in the middle of.

It's also a small bet against everything moving into the terminal. The terminals here run anything, an agent, a dev server, a plain shell, but everything around them is an ordinary window, with lists to scan and things to click.

A branch, start to finish

parallelist is built around branches you start and finish many times a day. Each branch gets a workspace, a directory of its own holding it as a git worktree or a full clone, so several programs can work on the same project at once without changing each other's files. Some branches need careful review and a trail of comments for whoever reads the history later. Others are a way to build several things side by side while you iterate, and are merged and removed within the hour. Both kinds need quick ends: a new workspace with its dev app running in seconds, and gone in seconds once the branch is done. If setting one up were slow, you would skip it and work in a directory that is already open. If removing one felt risky, it would stay on disk.

Start. ⌘N, then type a branch name, or pick one of the project's open issues and get a branch named after it. The workspace is made in the background (a clone shares the main workspace's objects when a worktree won't do, so even a large one takes seconds), its setup steps copy env files, link dependencies or run an install, and whatever you ticked to open it in starts when it's ready: an editor, a dev server, a program in its terminal. Double-clicking a branch with no workspace makes one with those same defaults and opens its terminal once it is set up.
Work. The workspace's terminal runs whatever the work needs, and the marks below say when it needs an answer or has finished.
Finish. Once the branch is merged, its row says so, and Cleanup offers up the workspace and then the branch, showing first what removing them would lose, so you can decide from the dialog. A program that removes its own workspace after merging leaves its terminal open until you've replied to how it ended.

What needs you

A mark means something needs your attention.

	Orange. Something in that terminal is waiting for an answer.
	Blue. A program finished its turn and nothing has been typed there since. The mark goes when you reply.
	Blinking. Still working. Nothing to decide there yet.

A mark stays until you type into its terminal, however long you've had it on screen. A turn you glanced at on the way to something else still waits for a reply, and the queue keeps it until it has one. Output alone never counts, or a chatty dev server would sit at the top for good. Work you start in the background finishes in the background: it waits for you to come to it rather than jumping in front of whatever you're doing. The queue along the bottom lists everything that is waiting, oldest first, and ⌘↵ goes to the next one.

What it does

Keeps one list: Origin's branches, kept current by a background fetch. Each row carries the branch's pull request, review and CI status from gh, its workspaces and their terminals, and an issue becomes a row when you start a workspace for it. Filtered to what is assigned to you or in flight, it is the to-do list, and a row goes when the work is merged and cleaned up.
Keeps every terminal running: Each workspace has its own, and it carries on while you look at something else. Switching back finds it where you left it, and it takes the keyboard straight away. Double-clicking a branch goes into its shell, the one already running there or a new one. ⌘P reaches any branch of any project, with whatever is waiting listed first.
Counts carefully: A commit counts as unpushed only if origin doesn't have it in any form, rebased or squash-merged copies included. A workspace git can't answer for shows as unknown, never as clean, so you don't have to check a number yourself.
Uses your git: It runs the git and gh you already have, so your hooks, credential helpers and SSH config work as they do in a terminal.

Getting it

There's no download yet. You'll need git, Rust and pnpm, and optionally gh for pull request data. Then:

git clone https://github.com/sgtlambda/parallelist.git
cd parallelist
./run.sh --build

That builds the app, copies it to /Applications and starts it. If anything's missing, run.sh says what and how to install it.