Roadmap

Where rootle is going. The north star: the terminal source browser for all the repositories you don't have checked out — one interface, code wherever it lives. The plan documents live in the app repo under plans/ — numbered, status in each header.

Shipped

  • The core browser: orgs → repos → trees in miller columns, syntax- highlighted preview with a line cursor, editor handoff, line-anchored URL yanking, / filters on every list
  • Search parity: file find and grep with quoted literals, negation and language: qualifiers; results stream as they arrive (protocol v1.3), render as decorated per-file boxes, expand to the whole file at the match line, and facet by repo/language
  • The clone wizard: VISUAL multi-select, org expansion, archived repos greyed, sorted by last push (protocol v1.4)
  • Eleven palettes with a picker, [ui] border shapes, optional Nerd Font powerline chrome, hot-reloading :settings
  • Providers: GitHub in-tree; GitLab and Bitbucket as one-binary adapters speaking NDJSON-RPC over stdio (protocol through v1.4 — streaming, honesty chips, error taxonomy, bounded compute)
  • The provider manager: checksum-verified installs from GitHub releases or plain-HTTP artifact hosts, update/upgrade/pin, --path for config-managed deployments
  • Revision awareness (v0.8.0, protocol v1.5): ␣ b switches branches/tags, rootle owner/repo@ref, ␣ p h file history with open-at-commit, ␣ p b blame run-margins, sha-anchored permalinks
  • The preview submode (␣ p): focus + zoom, vim vertical motions (counts, gg/G, pages, paragraphs, %, zt/zz/zb, :<line>)
  • A state-only modeline with a ? keys affordance; transient modes get a glued hint strip — one hint surface per context
  • rootle update self-updates tarball installs (checksum-verified, atomic); the modeline chips ↑ vX.Y.Z when a newer release exists; CHANGELOG.md rides every release from 0.8.0
  • forge-conformance: every protocol gotcha as a numbered case (FC-001..080) — all three providers run it in CI; it caught two real bugs on landing
  • Four-platform releases (linux + macOS, both arches), crates.io, homebrew formula + cask, checksum-verified install.sh

Next

  • Symbol search — ␣ s for symbols: the tree-sitter spike passed (320 files/s single-threaded, ~13 MiB on a 908-file corpus), so every forge gets it via the blob cache, with provider indexes preferred when they exist. plans/0013.
  • In-app provider management — browse/install/switch providers without leaving the TUI (the manager is CLI-only today).
  • The demo tape tells a workflow story — find → browse → grep → expand → yank, not just palettes.

Evaluating

  • Nerd Font chrome by default — the powerline modeline is opt-in because a terminal can't report its font and tofu-on-first-launch is the worst first impression. Open: a reliable probe or a better first-run hint. Meanwhile: :settings → ui.
  • Bitbucket private workspaces — the adapter is validated against public workspaces; the private path is validated by construction and waits on a first real workspace.
  • $/progress (work-done notifications) — a v2 protocol question; decided with its first consumer (cold-org enumeration), not before.

Decidedly not

  • PRs / issues / notifications dashboards — gh-dash and the web own that. rootle stays on code.
  • A generic git frontend — revisions are for browsing, not staging/committing.
  • AI features — the value here is speed, deterministic navigation, and composability.

North star

Jump across repos, search code, inspect files, and open exactly what you need — without cloning a dozen repositories or leaving your terminal. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket are bundled adapters; your company's forge is four methods away, and the conformance suite is how it earns the badge.