wtkill

Find and clean stale git worktree entries across all your repos — interactive TUI for humans, JSON output for AI agents and scripts.

wtkill is the npkill of git worktrees. Point it at a directory full of repos, it shows you every worktree across all of them with size and age, and you delete the stale ones with one keystroke.

It also exposes a clean non-interactive CLI with JSON output so AI agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and shell scripts can use it without a terminal.

Why

Worktrees are great until you forget them. Six months in you have 60 GB of branches you'll never touch again, scattered across .worktrees/, .claude/worktrees/, and one-offs you made on a Tuesday. git worktree list only shows them per-repo, and du on ~/Projects lies to you because it counts symlinks weirdly.

wtkill walks your projects directory, runs git worktree list --porcelain on every repo it finds, enriches each entry with du -sk and git log -1, and renders the whole picture sorted by what's eating the most disk.

Features

• Recursive scan of any directory looking for git repos (default ~/Projects, configurable)
• Live concurrent scan — 8 worktrees enriched in parallel via goroutines, results stream into the UI as they arrive
• Symlink-aware dedupe so repos that share a .git via symlink only show their worktrees once
• TUI with selection, sorted-by-size, status indicators (prunable, missing, deleted, failed), age-coloured (green ≤7d, yellow ≤30d, red >30d)
• Non-interactive CLI with subcommands list, rm, clean and JSON output by default when stdout is piped
• Filters for list and clean: --older-than, --branch <regex>, --prunable, --missing, --min-size
• Safety: clean without filters refuses to run; --dry-run previews; --force is opt-in
• Single static binary, ~4.6 MB, no runtime dependencies

Install

From source

Requires Go 1.25+.

git clone https://github.com/ohernandezdev/wtkill
cd wtkill
go build -o wtkill .
mv wtkill ~/.local/bin/   # or anywhere on $PATH

Homebrew (macOS Apple Silicon / Linux)

brew install ohernandezdev/tap/wtkill

Prebuilt binaries

Tarballs for darwin-arm64, linux-amd64, linux-arm64 are on the releases page.

# example: macOS Apple Silicon
curl -L https://github.com/ohernandezdev/wtkill/releases/latest/download/wtkill-v0.3.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz | tar xz
mv wtkill ~/.local/bin/   # or anywhere on PATH

Usage

Interactive TUI

wtkill                       # scan ~/Projects
wtkill --path ~/code         # scan a different root
wtkill --depth 6             # walk deeper than the default 4
wtkill --include-main        # also list each repo's main worktree

Keys

key	action
↑↓ / j k	navigate
PgUp / PgDn	jump a page
g / G	first / last
space	delete selected worktree
f	toggle --force (for worktrees with uncommitted changes)
m	toggle including each repo's main worktree (rescans)
r	rescan
q / Ctrl+C	quit

When a delete fails, the row turns ✗ failed and the footer shows git's error message for that row. Press f to enable --force, then space again to retry.

CLI (for AI agents and scripts)

When stdout is not a TTY, wtkill list and wtkill rm automatically emit JSON.

# JSON list of every worktree
wtkill list --json

# Filtered text list
wtkill list --older-than 30d --min-size 100MB

# Bulk-clean: preview what 60-day-old branches would be removed
wtkill clean --older-than 60d --dry-run

# Bulk-clean: remove every worktree git considers prunable
wtkill clean --prunable --force

# Remove specific paths
wtkill rm /path/to/worktree-a /path/to/worktree-b --force

JSON schema for list

{
  "root": "/Users/me/Projects",
  "scanned_repos": 122,
  "elapsed_ms": 15386,
  "total_bytes": 19789389824,
  "count": 8,
  "worktrees": [
    {
      "repo": "/Users/me/Projects/my-app",
      "path": "/Users/me/Projects/my-app/.worktrees/feature-x",
      "branch": "feature-x",
      "head": "e5d70bfe944da1ab956ad1177876767fc99ebede",
      "detached": false,
      "bare": false,
      "prunable": false,
      "missing": false,
      "size_bytes": 4519583744,
      "age_days": 9
    }
  ]
}

JSON schema for rm / clean

{
  "results": [
    {
      "path": "/Users/me/Projects/foo/.worktrees/bar",
      "repo": "/Users/me/Projects/foo",
      "ok": true
    }
  ],
  "failed": 0
}

clean adds dry_run, matched, removed, failed, freed_bytes at the top level.

Filters reference

Applies to list and clean.

flag	example	meaning
--older-than <dur>	--older-than 30d	last commit older than this (s m h d w)
--branch <regex>	--branch '^claude/'	branch name matches regex
--prunable		only worktrees git already considers prunable
--missing		only worktrees whose path no longer exists on disk
--min-size <size>	--min-size 500MB	minimum on-disk size (B KB MB GB TB)

Exit codes

code	meaning
0	success
1	one or more operations failed (partial success)
2	usage error (bad flag, missing required filter, etc.)

AI agent integration

Drop this into your agent's system prompt or tool definition:

You have access to the wtkill CLI. Use wtkill list --json to discover git worktrees under the user's projects directory, then wtkill rm <path> --force --json to remove specific ones, or wtkill clean <filters> --dry-run --json to preview a bulk operation. Always do a --dry-run before any clean and surface what it would remove to the user.

Because output is JSON by default off-TTY and exit codes are well-defined, agents can parse results without regex on stderr output.

How it works

1. Discovery — wtkill walks the configured root with os.ReadDir, depth-limited, skipping common heavy dirs (node_modules, target, .next, etc.). A directory is a repo if it contains a .git entry.
2. Dedupe — for each candidate repo it runs git rev-parse --absolute-git-dir, resolves symlinks via filepath.EvalSymlinks, and dedupes so two paths sharing the same .git only get scanned once.
3. Enrichment — for each repo it calls git worktree list --porcelain to get the worktree list, then for each non-main worktree it runs du -sk for size and git log -1 --format=%ct for age. These are dispatched as goroutines bounded by a semaphore (8 concurrent).
4. Render — the TUI is Bubble Tea (Elm-Architecture model/update/view) styled with Lip Gloss. Updates stream in from a channel as worktrees are enriched; the list re-sorts by size on every insert.
5. Delete — git worktree remove <path> (with --force if toggled), followed by git worktree prune to clean stale admin entries.

What wtkill is not

• It does not delete branches, tags, or remotes. Only worktree entries.
• It does not touch your main worktree unless you pass --include-main.
• It is not a replacement for npkill — npkill is for node_modules; this is for git worktrees. Different scope.
• It does not currently know how to GC orphan .git/worktrees/<name>/ admin directories that git left behind after a manual rm -rf. Use git worktree prune for that.

Contributing

PRs welcome. The codebase is small and intentionally so:

• main.go — entrypoint, subcommand dispatch, version, help
• scan.go — concurrent repo discovery, worktree enrichment, symlink dedupe, git worktree remove
• model.go — Bubble Tea model + Lip Gloss render
• cmd.go — non-interactive list / rm / clean and filter parsing

Before opening a PR:

go fmt ./...
go vet ./...
go build -o wtkill .
./wtkill list --json --depth 2 | head -20   # smoke test

License

MIT © Omar Hernández (@ohernandezdev)

Built on top of Bubble Tea and Lip Gloss by @charmbracelet. Inspired by npkill.