Opening your first repository

Innesta opens repositories; it does not keep them anywhere of its own. A repository is a folder on your disk, and opening one in Innesta changes nothing about it.

There are three ways to get one in front of you, and the welcome screen offers all three.

Open one you already have

File ▸ Open Repository… (⌘O) shows a file picker. Choose the folder — or any folder inside it, because Innesta walks up to find the Git root by itself, so picking Sources/ when you meant the project is not a mistake you have to correct.

You can also drag a folder onto the window, or onto the Innesta icon in the Dock.

Clone one from a server

File ▸ Clone Repository… (⌘L) takes an HTTPS or SSH URL, or the path of another repository on the same Mac. Paste the URL and Innesta suggests a folder name from it; change it if you want the working copy called something else.

Credentials go into the macOS Keychain, so a private repository asks once.

Start a new one

File ▸ Initialize Repository… turns a folder you already have into a repository. Nothing in the folder moves and nothing is deleted; a .git directory appears next to what is already there and everything shows up as untracked, ready for a first commit.

Or a Playground

If what you want is somewhere to try things, Innesta will make you one — during onboarding, which is the only place it offers to. The Playground is a local repository with a small amount of history in it, created for the purpose of being experimented on, and it can be set up with GitFlow branches if you want to see how those work.

Nothing in a Playground is connected to anything else on your Mac.

Coming back to it

Everything you open joins the Projects list in the toolbar, which remembers more than the path: each entry shows the branch it is on, whether it has uncommitted changes or unresolved conflicts, and how far ahead or behind its remote it was when Innesta last looked.

The list is searchable, and each entry can be copied as a path, shown in Finder, or removed. Removing a project from the list does not delete anything — it only stops Innesta offering it.