A free Git review companion that sits beside your AI coding editor. The commit graph, diffs, and every in-flight worktree, refreshing live as your agent changes the repo under you.
AI coding editors generate more diffs and commits than any tool in history, and they review them in a cramped side panel. Sit with that for a second: the tool creating the most diffs has the worst diff UX. Grove fills the gap from the outside. It is a desktop app that sits beside Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, a terminal agent, or all of them at once, and answers one question well. What just changed, across which files and commits, and is it good?
The Git GUI market is crowded, and almost none of it is actually free. GitKraken and Tower are paid, Fork and Sublime Merge nag, GitHub Desktop is thin, GitButler is source-available with a no-compete clause. The free, good-looking slice is sitting there empty. Grove is GPL-3.0, so free means free and forks stay open. GPL rather than AGPL because the network clause does nothing for a desktop app; copyleft alone stops proprietary forks.
This is not a mockup. I review my own repos in it daily, including one with 400+ commits and dozens of branches. The commit graph is a custom SVG lane renderer with no off-the-shelf library, because the look is the whole differentiator: color-coded lanes, ref pills, hollow nodes for unpushed commits, and real diffs on merge commits (diffed against the first parent, so a merge never shows up empty). Around it, a diff and blame viewer, a worktree dashboard with clean-or-dirty and ahead/behind for every tree, and Spotlight: one Ctrl+K across files, commit messages, branches, and file contents, instant because the heavy every-path-that-ever-existed walk is precomputed once and cached per query.
And it is alive. A file-watcher redraws the graph, status, and worktrees as your agent mutates the repo under you, with a pulsing live indicator. Every SHA, path, and branch gets a one-click copy.
Grove was rebuilt on Electron, React, and TypeScript around a headless Node git engine, away from the Tauri, Rust, and Svelte shell it started as. One language across the app and the engine means the commit-graph types, the diff model, and the worktree state are the same types in every layer, so a change to one cannot leave the others describing a shape that no longer exists.
Alpha. The v0 features have shipped and it survives daily use on real repos, but it is Windows-only for now and the installers are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn until code-signing lands. Next up: syntax highlighting in diffs, a stash view, and wiring the bring-your-own-agent pillar properly.