What does Innesta not do?

The things it deliberately leaves to Git, to the provider, or to you.

Worth knowing before you go looking.

Not in the app

  • Interactive rebase. Reordering, editing or squashing commits within a branch is a command line operation. Innesta shows a rebase in progress and resolves its conflicts.
  • Cherry-pick, as a command. A cherry-pick started elsewhere is shown and resolvable here.
  • Bisect. Halving the history to find the commit that broke something is git bisect.
  • A file’s history across a rename. Choosing an exact file in history search lists the commits that touched that path, and stops where the file had another name; git log --follow carries on past it.
  • Submodules.
  • Git LFS.
  • Worktrees, as a command — though a worktree’s directory opens like any other repository.
  • A support/ GitFlow workflow. The prefix is stored for compatibility; there is no lifecycle for it.
  • Starting a branch anywhere but where you are. New Branch… branches from the commit you have checked out. Naming an older commit — to recover one from the reflog, say — is git branch <name> <hash>.

Nor does Innesta tell one kind of repository from another. For one that uses LFS or submodules, a linked worktree, or a shallow, sparse or partial clone, what you see is what git itself reports. A bare repository does not open at all: Innesta needs a working tree.

Mostly read-only on the provider

Pull and merge requests can be read and opened on the provider. They cannot be approved, commented on, or merged from Innesta. Review is a conversation, and half a conversation is worse than a link to all of it.

Pipelines go one step further: an existing run or job can be stopped or re-run, and a GitLab manual job started. Creating a pipeline, dispatching a workflow, approving a deployment and editing CI/CD configuration stay on the provider.

Only GitHub and GitLab, for the API

Provider links work for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps. Reading requests and pipelines works for GitHub and GitLab. GitHub Enterprise Server works through the API with a token you supply, and not through OAuth.

Not on your Mac

  • Intel Macs. Apple Silicon only.
  • macOS 13 and earlier. macOS 14 Sonoma is the floor.
  • Anything without git. Innesta drives the system binary rather than reimplementing it.