Gako
Free software · AGPL-3.0-or-later

Supervise coding agents across many repositories

Gako is a lean desktop app for a folder of independent Git repositories. See what your agents changed in every one of them, and know which agent needs you. It sits beside your editor, not in place of it.

Get Gako Source on GitHub

macOS · Windows · Linux

Gako with several repositories open: changed files grouped by repository on the left, a diff in the middle, and three agents on the right, one working, one waiting for approval and one finished.

What it does

One calm window for many repositories and many agents

Microservice codebases, robotics workspaces and polyrepo teams keep their code in many repositories side by side. Editors show them one at a time, or one long panel each. Gako shows you what changed.

Every repository in one view

Gako finds the repositories under a folder and lists the ones with changes: branch, sync state, changed files. Clean ones fold away. Fetch, pull, push, switch branch or revert a file from the list.

Agents in real terminals

Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi or any other program, in any repository, with its own interface untouched. Gako adds the part terminals lack: who's working, who's done, who's waiting for you.

Review, read and search

Read-only diffs and files with VS Code's own editor component, each repository's history, search scoped to the repositories you pick, and go to definition across all of them.

Your editor for editing

Gako never edits code. “Open in editor” takes you to the line in VS Code, Zed, Cursor, Sublime Text or the editor you configure.

Light by design

A Rust core does the heavy lifting: Git, file watching, search, terminals. Gako holds itself to measured budgets against VS Code, and uses a fraction of its memory.

Yours, and only yours

Free software under the GNU AGPL. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud. Its settings come only from your own file, never from a folder it opens.

Agent supervision

Know which agent needs you, without checking every terminal

Agents tell their terminal what they're doing, in titles and notifications. Gako reads those signals, so the agent bar can show each agent's state at a glance.

  • Working while an agent is busy.
  • Waiting for you when it asks for approval, including Claude Code's approval prompts on macOS and Linux.
  • Finished while you weren't looking, marked until you look.

Measured, not claimed

A fraction of an editor's weight

The same machine, the same workspace, the same terminal settings, measured over the whole process tree. Gako against VS Code:

Memory, idle
204 MB
VS Code: 1,495 MB
Memory, four agents at work
348 MB
VS Code: 1,388 MB
Cold start
0.34 s
VS Code: 3.4 s
A 250 MB emoji dump
4.6 s
VS Code: 36.8 s

Measured on a MacBook Air M5 with 16 GB, running macOS. The method, the budgets and every result are in the performance notes.

What it isn't

A companion to your editor, not another one

It doesn't edit code.Agents and your editor do that. Gako's viewer and diffs are read-only, by design.
It doesn't replace your agents' interfaces.They run in real terminals, exactly as they would anywhere else.
It doesn't stage or commit.It keeps you in sync and undoes mistakes; committing stays with agents and the terminal.
It doesn't host extensions.No marketplace, no plugins: a small app that does one job.

Install

Download Gako

Gako for macOS, Windows and Linux. Each button opens the latest release: pick the file that ends as shown. The packages aren’t signed by Apple or Microsoft, so your system asks once before opening Gako.

macOS

Apple silicon

Get the .dmg
  1. Open the disk image and drag Gako to Applications.
  2. Open Gako. When macOS says it can’t verify it, go to System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Windows

x64

Get the .zip
  1. Unzip it, and move the Gako folder to a local disk, such as %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs.
  2. Run Gako.exe. If SmartScreen stops it, click More info, then Run anyway.

Linux

x64

Get the .tar.gz
  1. Unpack it where you’ll keep Gako.
  2. On Ubuntu 24.04 and later, in the gako folder: sudo chown root chrome-sandbox && sudo chmod 4755 chrome-sandbox
  3. Run ./gako.

Every release is on GitHub. To build Gako from source, and for settings and shortcuts, see the README.