Diffy

Diffy is a small native macOS menu bar app for solo developers. It watches local git repositories and shows live working-tree diff stats directly in the menu bar.

Diffy is local-only. It does not use GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, PRs, issues, cloud services, or accounts. Its git commands are read-only with one explicit, user-initiated exception: removing a linked worktree from the in-app confirmation dialog.

Status

v0.11.0 — available via Homebrew Cask. The app uses macOS 26 APIs and is ad-hoc signed (not Developer ID signed or notarized). Install instructions below include the required manual Gatekeeper quarantine-clearing step.

This release is the interface refresh: a menu-bar badge that carries each group's colour, a narrower popover built like Apple's own menu extras, and a window with a system sidebar and an inline inspector. The previous interface stays available behind Settings → Interface → Classic while the new one settles. The release also fixes a freeze on repositories with thousands of changed files: the popover now shows file lists a page at a time.

Diffy remains focused on its original local-only, menu-bar-first scope.

Features

• Groups: every repo belongs to a group, and each group owns one menu-bar item, one colour, its own diff colours, and an optional small label (1–2 characters or an emoji, before or after the counts). A group shows the aggregate +x / −y of its counted members, ± when everything is clean, counts above 9,999 as 10k, and a warning triangle when a repository can't be read. The group's colour draws a pill behind the counts, so several groups stay apart at a glance.
• Popover: left-click a group's menu-bar item for a 340 pt popover scoped to that group. The header has the totals, a green/red ratio bar, branch, file count and refresh time; below it, Changes or History. File rows put the name first and the folder dimmed, with the status tile and +a −b at the right. Click a row to open the file in your editor, hover for Reveal in Finder and Copy Path, or right-click for the same. A group with several repositories shows each on its own platter — name and ⋯ on top; worktree, branch, file count and +/− beneath — with its four largest files and a "Show 50 more" row that pages through the rest; the ⋯ menu offers Reveal in Finder, Copy Path, Copy Branch Name and Remove Worktree…. The footer has Add Repository… and Open Diffy (⌘O). Esc closes.
• History: each repository's last 1–20 commits (set per repository) with short SHA, subject, age, and whether the commit is on the configured upstream, local only, or has no upstream. Expanding a commit shows file statuses and +/- totals, never source hunks. Commit rows offer Copy SHA and Copy Subject; historical file rows can copy the path or open the current working-tree version when it exists.
• Diffy window: the occasional configuration window has a sidebar of groups (coloured tile, live counts, drag to reorder, context menu to hide, show or remove, New Group at the foot) and an inspector with a live preview of the menu-bar badge, the Show in menu bar toggle, label and position, group colour and diff colours edited inline, and the group's repositories with branch, path and status. ⓘ on a repository opens its settings sheet (group, editor, commit history limit, count in totals, safe removal). Removing a group asks whether its repositories stay in Diffy as separate groups or go with it. The toolbar + (⌘O) adds a repository. App settings (Interface, Open at Login, updates, version) live in Settings (⌘,).
• Adding a repository is one step: the open panel has an "Add to" menu for a new group or an existing one, whether you start from the popover or the window.
• Hide a group from the menu bar from its inspector, the sidebar context menu, or by right-clicking its menu-bar item; the item disappears until toggled back on. Per-repository "Count in totals" silences a noisy repo within a group without removing the item.
• The menu-bar item's right-click menu has Open Diffy, Settings…, Hide "group" from Menu Bar, and Quit Diffy. Closing the window hides Diffy back to the menu bar; opening Diffy again from the Dock, Finder or Spotlight shows it, which is also the way back in when every group is hidden. ⌘Q quits.
• Branch labels appear in the popover and the window. Detached HEAD shows the short SHA.
• Linked worktrees discovered automatically from git worktree list --porcelain and shown indented under their family owner, each with its own diff stats and branch. Manually-added worktrees stay as top-level rows and are never duplicated under a sibling. Remove a finished auto-managed worktree from the popover's ⋯ menu or the settings sheet via a confirmation dialog; Diffy never uses --force, so dirty worktrees must be handled in your terminal first.
• Open changed files in a configured editor (Xcode, Cursor, VS Code, Zed, or a custom shell command). Deleted-file rows are shown for context but are not opened from the working tree.
• Classic interface: Settings → Interface → Classic brings back the 0.10.0 look, including the Standard / Apple Glass appearance setting, until the new interface is settled. The switch is temporary.
• Launch at Login toggle in Settings (requires Diffy installed to /Applications).
• Filesystem-triggered refresh with polling fallback.
• Homebrew updates today, with Sparkle packaged behind release metadata for a future appcast.

Screenshots

At a glance, Diffy lives in the menu bar: one pill per group in the group's colour, with its aggregate working-tree diff.

Diffy's window is an occasional management surface for groups, repositories, and the menu-bar badge.

The menu-bar popover breaks a group down by repository, branch, changed file, status, and per-file diff counts.

Build and Run Locally

From the Mac terminal:

swift test
./script/build_and_run.sh

The run script builds the SwiftPM target, creates dist/Diffy.app, ad-hoc signs it, and launches it.

Package a Release

./script/package_release.sh <version> <build>

The zip is created at dist/release/Diffy-<version>.zip.

Install

The easiest path is Homebrew:

brew tap tiliakoos/diffy
brew install --cask diffy
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Diffy.app

The xattr step is required because Diffy is ad-hoc signed and not notarized — macOS will block it on first launch without it.

To upgrade an existing install:

brew upgrade --cask diffy
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Diffy.app

Auto-Updates

Diffy includes Sparkle integration, but update checks are enabled only in release bundles that include a Sparkle appcast URL and EdDSA public key. See docs/release.md.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Nick Tiliakos.

Diffy is licensed under the MIT License. You may use, copy, modify, and distribute it under the terms in LICENSE.

Released app bundles include LICENSE, THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt, and SOURCE_CODE.md in Diffy.app/Contents/Resources.

Read-Only Guarantee

Diffy is read-only with one explicit, user-initiated exception: removing a linked worktree via the in-app confirmation dialog (which runs git worktree remove <path> without --force). All other git operations Diffy performs (diff, status, log, show, rev-list, observational rev-parse, and worktree list) are strictly observational, run with GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS=0 and --no-optional-locks. Commit publication labels compare against local remote-tracking refs; Diffy never fetches. Diffy never stages, commits, checks out, cleans, resets, rebases, merges, or otherwise mutates a repository's working tree.