An app to display GitHub notifications in your Mac OS menu bar.
gitnews-demo.mov
There are several other apps that are similar to this one. Notably, you might want to check out:
However, Gitnews has several unique features that I love and I hope you'll like them too:
- Supports light and dark modes.
- Supports notifications on private repos.
- Shows read notifications as well as unread ones.
- Allows marking notifications as unread.
- Allows temporarily muting notifications from repos that you want to exclude.
- Allows holding down the Command key to open multiple notifications at once.
- The menubar icon is different when there are notifications that you've seen but not read.
Gitnews has three icons that you'll normally see:
No unread notifications.
Unread notifications that you've already seen. This means there are unread notifications but nothing new since the last time you clicked.
Unseen notifications. This means that there are notifications that probably just arrived.
Currently the packaged version of Gitnews is only built for Mac OS but the app could work on any platform. If anyone wants to try running it in Windows or Linux I'd be happy to discuss adding support; please create an issue.
💡 Note: I don't have a paid Apple developer account, so the package will warn you that the app is from an "Unidentified developer". The first time you open the app you will need to right-click on it and select "Open" from the context menu. This Apple support doc explains how to do this in more detail.
👉 Visit the releases page to download an image of the latest release.
When you run Gitnews, you will need to generate an API key from your GitHub account. The app will guide you through creating one.
💣 If you have any trouble with Gitnews, please create an issue to describe what happened.
App icons based on images from Iconoir ( MIT).
gitnews-menubar is built using Electron, React, and gitnews.
To run the development version from the source, first install all dependencies by running yarn (you must have yarn installed for this to work). Next run the command yarn start.
The app uses debug, so you can enable all sorts of debug output in the console by typing
localStorage.setItem('debug', 'gitnews-menubar')Rather than use real data, you can use mock data by enabling demo mode. This also disables network side effects (like marking a notification as read). To do this, create a .env file in the source directory and include the following:
GITNEWS_DEMO_MODE=y
The app logs its activity to a file on the local machine using the library electon-log. On the Mac OS this produces a file in ~/Library/Logs/Gitnews/main.log.
To create a packaged Mac OS App, first install dependencies by running yarn (you must have yarn installed for this to work).
Next run the following command: yarn run build.
You will then find an executable application in the out directory.