Sift

Sift is a local-first GitHub inbox organizer for people who live in pull requests and issues.

GitHub notifications are good at collecting activity and weak at prioritizing it. Sift pulls your inbox and adjacent repo activity into a local SQLite database, classifies it with explicit rules, and gives you a browser UI to work through it by signal instead of by noise.

Package name note: the npm package is gh-sift

Layers

• Needs You: review requests, assignments, and your open work
• Your Circle: maintainer activity on repos you own or contribute to
• Your Repos: non-maintainer activity on repos you own
• Interesting: mentions, high-engagement threads, and hotter starred-repo activity
• Everything Else: background activity and lower-signal starred-repo activity

Tab view

Feed view

Why local-first

• your data stays on your machine
• search runs locally against SQLite FTS
• setup is simple: one server, one browser UI, one GitHub token

Semantic ranking and richer filtering can come later. The current goal is to make the non-AI baseline opinionated, useful, and trustworthy.

Platforms

Sift is intended to run locally on:

• macOS
• Linux
• Windows

On Linux, secure token storage uses Secret Service when available. On Windows, it uses the Windows Credential Vault. On macOS, it uses Keychain. If no secure credential store is available, Sift falls back to local config storage.

Requirements

• Node.js 22+
• npm

On Apple Silicon, use native arm64 Node. If node -p process.arch prints x64, you are running under Rosetta and native modules like better-sqlite3 may break.

Install

npm install -g gh-sift
sift

Then open the local URL printed by the server, usually http://127.0.0.1:4185.

If that port is busy, Sift will automatically move to the next available local port.

The first sync can take a bit depending on your notification volume and repo graph.

If you prefer not to install globally:

npx gh-sift

Apple Silicon note

Run npm install -g gh-sift --build-from-source only if you hit a better-sqlite3 architecture mismatch after switching between native and Rosetta terminals.

GitHub token

Sift expects a GitHub personal access token with:

• notifications
• read:user
• repo

Sift stores the token in:

• macOS: Keychain
• Linux: Secret Service
• Windows: Credential Vault

If secure storage is unavailable, it falls back to the local config file in ~/.config/sift/config.json.

On Windows, config falls under %APPDATA%\\Sift.

Source development

git clone https://github.com/vignesh07/sift.git
cd sift
npm install
npm start
npm run dev
npm run dev:web
npm run build
npm test

Environment

• PORT or SIFT_PORT: preferred local server port
• SIFT_OPEN_BROWSER=0: do not auto-open a browser tab on startup

Current scope

Included now:

• local sync from GitHub notifications and search
• layered prioritization UI
• local full-text search across title, repo, author, and labels
• periodic background sync
• local SQLite persistence
• secure token storage on macOS, Linux, and Windows when OS services are available

Not included yet:

• semantic search or embeddings
• saved views and deeper filters
• multi-account support
• hosted or collaborative mode

License

MIT