Feature request: Git status badge on sidebar workspace rows

[Kevin-McIsaac]

Feature request: Git status badge on sidebar workspace rows

Summary

Show each Workspace's git state directly on its sidebar row, Claude Code
statusline-style:

the_paragliding_app  | 🟡 main
paragliding_site_federation  | 🟢 main ↑2

Name stays in the row's normal styling; everything after the separator is
muted tertiary text. The emoji is the only colored element — green when the
working tree is clean, yellow when it has uncommitted changes.

Why

The sidebar is where I decide which workspace to work in, but it currently
says nothing about the state of those workspaces. Answering "is anything
uncommitted here?", "which checkout am I on?", or "does this branch need a
push?" requires opening a terminal per workspace. Claude Code's status line
set the expectation: one glance, per project, at branch + dirty + sync state.
For multi-checkout work (main checkout + worktrees), the rows are
indistinguishable today; with the badge they read at a glance.

Proposed UX

Row (always visible)

the_paragliding_app  | 🟢 main
the_paragliding_app  | 🟡 main ↑1 ↓2

• name | emoji branch — pipe separator in tertiary; branch in tertiary, 12px.
• Emoji: 🟢 clean, 🟡 dirty (uncommitted changes present).
• ↑n / ↓n appended only when nonzero — unpushed / unpulled commit counts.
• Graceful states: name-only while loading, for the Ungrouped bucket, and for
  non-git directories — those rows are otherwise unidentifiable if the badge
  replaced the name.
• Keep the workspace name always (not replaced by git info), so rows stay
  stable when switching between git and non-git workspaces.

Hover card (detail on demand)

The existing workspace hover card gains a git section:

the_paragliding_app
~/Projects/the_paragliding_app
Created 28 Aug, 15:12
──────────────────────────────
🟡 main · 2874788 · ↑1 ↓2
1 uncommitted file · 8 untracked
last commit: 08c58a1 "ui: Claude Code statusline style" · 12 minutes ago

• Branch, short commit hash, sync counts on one line.
• Dirty detail split into changed vs untracked file counts — the row can't
  carry this.
• Last commit hash, subject, and relative age.

Behavior notes (UX-level)

• Freshness: status must not freeze at mount time — a row showing 🟡 after
  the user has committed is worse than no badge. Poll on a modest interval
  (a few seconds) with a per-workspace shared cache so row and hover agree.
• Momentum: the badge should feel passive — no interaction required, no
  action buttons in v1. Hover carries the detail.
• Low visual weight: everything after the pipe is muted; the emoji is the
  single color signal. No brackets, no extra badges.
• Long names/branches: the workspace name keeps priority; git part should
  truncate, never push the name out.

Questions for maintainers

1. Is per-workspace git state something you'd want computed host-side and
   exposed to the client (the browser can't run git), or is this better
   scoped as an extension point (a row annotation slot) that a plugin fills?
2. Any concern with rows becoming a live surface (polling) — and if so, what
   cadence/trigger would you prefer (e.g. refresh on hover or on sidebar
   focus instead of interval)?
3. Would you accept emoji, or would you want a themed dot/icon consistent
   with the existing state aliases?

Happy to test any proposed design against a two-workspace setup (main
checkout + worktrees) — that's where this earns its keep.

[argszero]

Source verification against current master (cd5ef81481, 0.1.2-alpha.1) — this feature request is well-scoped, and the data you need is already in the row model.

1. The workspace rows exist and already carry the path. ProjectRowItem (packages/client/ui-workspace/src/client/rows/Rows.tsx) renders the project rows; the row's GroupNode carries cwd: string | undefined (tree.ts:52) — so the directory needed to query git state is already in the browser's row model. Grep confirms zero git/branch/ahead/behind/dirty anywhere in ui-workspace (consistent with the tree-wide "no git provider" finding from discussion #5073).

2. The important part: the sidebar has no additive seam for this today. This is the difference between your request and the composer-chip variant:

• sidebar = { kind: 'single' }, occupied by SidebarRoot (packages/client/ui-layout/src/client/index.ts:43-52)
• sidebar.workspaces = { kind: 'single', scope: 'root' }, occupied by WorkspaceBrowser (packages/client/ui-sidebar/src/client/contract/slots.ts:35, registered at ui-workspace/src/client/index.ts:136)
• There is no per-row list slot for workspace rows — sidebar.footer.action is the only list slot in the sidebar. A plugin registering into sidebar.workspaces would shadow the whole browser (single-slot semantics: second entry replaces the first), losing the native session tree/grouping. So a sidebar-row badge is not plugin-implementable without an upstream slot seam.

Contrast with the composer: conversation.composer.dock is an open list slot (ui-conversation/src/client/contract/slots.ts:131, additive entries, ascending order) — which is exactly why the composer-chip variant is implementable as a standalone plugin today. That one exists: @argszero/cordis-plugin-git-status (branch / ↳ upstream / ↑ahead / ↓behind / ●dirty-count chip; node half reads git status --porcelain=v2 --branch read-only and pushes snapshots over SSE — same field set as your proposed badge).

3. Upstream blueprint for the sidebar variant. Add a per-row list slot seam, e.g. sidebar.workspaces.row rendered inside ProjectRowItem with the row's workspaceId + cwd passed through. Once that seam exists, the sidebar badge becomes plugin-implementable exactly like the composer chip — the node half already keys snapshots by directory, so a plugin could poll each row's cwd and feed the badge, with the hover-card detail as a second registration on the same seam. Until then, the honest answer is: composer chip = plugin today, sidebar rows = upstream seam first.

Related: dsh-github-sidebar (#5093) shows a community sidebar surface for GitHub data — same no-seam constraint, worth knowing about if you look at their approach.

[Kevin-McIsaac]

Thank you for the feedback. It helped me create a package for the project git status badge. I ended up creating a patch for the seam, then a plugin that uses that seam. See dsh-workspace-git-badge

[Kevin-McIsaac]

Created a plugin + Seam Patch

See dsh-workspace-git-badge for installing plugin and running seam patch