Local-first workspace manager for Git

Your work is safe before you commit it.

Orbit is a local-first workspace manager that sits alongside Git. A background daemon captures snapshots as you edit, so uncommitted work survives a bad checkout. When you are ready, it helps you turn a session of messy edits into commits that read like decisions.

Install Source

Working tree
Snapshot
Commit
Snapshots in the last hour

Fig. 1 Illustration, not a recording. Snapshots gather around the working tree as you edit, until you decide what becomes a commit.

Status

Orbit is alpha software under active trust revalidation. Local snapshot capture is best-effort and does not guarantee that every save is captured. Remote identity, key, and secret workflows are experimental and must not be used to protect production secrets. The repository's product and security contracts are authoritative on what is currently guaranteed; this page is not.

What it does

Where a capability appears in the maturity table, its state is shown next to it.

Four capabilities, stated plainly.

Snapshot timeline

Implemented

A local daemon watches the workspace and records best-effort snapshots to a local SQLite database, so uncommitted work is recoverable.

Intent-based staging

Implemented

Turn a session of unrelated edits into separate, coherent commits, instead of reconstructing your reasoning from a diff hours later.

Secret detection

Implemented

Flags likely secrets and .env files locally before a commit happens, and can inject variables into a subprocess in memory rather than on disk.

Git-native

Orbit stages through Git itself. Your repository stays a normal Git repository, and nobody else on the team has to install anything.

Fig. 2 Illustration. One hour, fourteen snapshots, two unrelated changes made in between each other, staged as two separate commits.

orbit — ~/projects/api

# PLACEHOLDER: illustrative, not captured from a real session
$ orbit status
  workspace   ~/projects/api
  daemon      running
  snapshots   14 in the last hour

$ orbit commit
  ? 2 groups of related changes detected
  ...

Maturity

Summarised by hand, and therefore capable of lagging the repository. When the two disagree, the repository is right.

Where each part stands.

Orbit publishes what is proven separately from what is intended. The table below is a summary; the repository's contract registry is the authority.

2 implemented 1 experimental 1 reopened

Area	State
Local snapshot timeline and staging	Implemented
Local secret detection	Implemented
Team keys, devices, remote secret sync	Experimental
Key rotation and recovery	Reopened

Install

Not released yet.

Orbit is not publicly released yet. Installation instructions, prebuilt binaries, and platform support belong here once there is an alpha people can actually download.

Until then the source and the getting-started guide are in the repository.

github.com/ZensykU2/Orbit