Kyde

I don't know Rust.

Pre-AI I was doing thousands of commits a year from a full IDE. Now agents write most of the code, and my day is starting them, keeping track of which one needs me, and checking what they wrote before it lands. I was still doing that last part in the IDE's commit and diff view, one of the few things heavy enough to make me wait for a JVM to start.

So Kyde is that day in one app that opens instantly: agents in their own worktrees, with the commit view, side-by-side diff, 3-way merge and editor one click away.

Why Kyde

• Many agents, no collisions. Each agent gets its own git worktree and branch, so parallel agents never trample each other's files. Live status shows which one is working, done, or waiting on you.
• Issue to merged in one place. Start a GitHub issue or review a PR and get a fresh worktree with an agent already briefed. Review its diff, stage hunks, commit and push, and Kyde cleans the worktree up once the work lands.
• IDE-grade diff and merge. An IntelliJ-style commit view with a side-by-side, word-level diff and per-hunk staging, a 3-way merge resolver, a history graph and local history, plus an editor for the fix you'd rather make yourself.
• Instant. Native and GPU-rendered on gpui, the framework behind Zed. No JVM, no Electron. It opens in a blink and scrolls a 37k-line file at 120fps.

What it does

Agents

A home for Claude Code (or any agent CLI): projects → worktrees → tabs, each tab an agent.

• Live status — working, done, or needs you, with a sound when one finishes and a key to jump to it.
• Issue to agent in one click — start a GitHub issue or review a PR and get a fresh worktree with an agent already briefed.
• GitHub in the sidebar — issues and PRs render in-app with comments, commits, changed files and checks. Comment or close without opening a browser.
• New task, new worktree — ask a busy agent for something unrelated and it moves itself to a clean worktree.
• Outlives the window — quit Kyde and agents keep working; reopen and they're back.
• Cleans up — spots merged or finished work and closes its tabs and worktrees.
• Scriptable — ky agent … drives agents from the shell, so agents can drive each other.
• Agents only — hide the rest of the IDE when the agents are all you need. One click opens a worktree in the editor.

Git: side-by-side diff and 3-way merge

• Commit — changed files beside an editable side-by-side diff with word-level highlighting. Stage or revert any hunk from the center gutter: git add -p, made visual.
• Merge — a conflicts list, then a 3-pane yours | result | theirs resolver that applies the non-conflicting changes in one click.
• History — branches sidebar, commit graph, and each commit's diff against its parent, the latest, or your working tree.
• Local History — snapshots independent of git, taken on save and before every destructive action, with per-hunk restore.
• The rest — push, pull and fetch from the toolbar, branch and worktree switchers, rollback, and compare any two files.

IDE

• Folder tree, tabs, file management, and fuzzy Go to File, Find Action and Find in Files.
• Tree-sitter highlighting for 16 languages, installed on demand, with folding, error squiggles and ⌘-click to definition.
• Markdown and image preview, and a built-in terminal. Drop a file on it, or on an agent, to paste its path.
• WebStorm or VSCode keymap, and an IDE-style dark theme (plus light and colour-blind palettes).

Install

Grab the latest build from Releases.

• macOS — kyde-macos.zip (Apple Silicon) or kyde-macos-x86_64.zip (Intel). Unzip and drag Kyde.app to /Applications.
• Linux — kyde-linux-x86_64.AppImage. chmod +x it and run it. Needs glibc 2.35+ (Ubuntu 22.04 or newer) and a Vulkan driver.

First launch offers to install a ky command: ky opens your projects, ky /path/to/repo opens a repo.

Build

cargo build --release
cargo test --workspace

Needs Rust 1.96+. On macOS, gpui also needs Apple's Metal Toolchain (xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain). On Linux, install the dev libraries first:

sudo apt install pkg-config libssl-dev libzstd-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev \
  libxkbcommon-x11-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev libx11-dev libxcb1-dev \
  libvulkan-dev clang cmake

Each language is a Cargo feature, so a smaller build can leave grammars out: cargo build --release --no-default-features --features rust,json,toml.

FAQ

Which AI coding agents does it work with? Claude Code by default, with live status from a hook Kyde installs. The start command is configurable, so other agent CLIs run too, with a simpler status dot.

Does it replace my IDE? It replaces what I still opened one for once agents started writing the code: reviewing, committing, merging and quick edits. There's no language server, so no autocomplete or refactoring. The agents do that part.

Is Kyde free and open source? Yes — Apache-2.0.

Does it run on Windows? Not as a download yet, but cargo build --release works. Packaging it is a good first issue.

Contributing

If you open a PR, please be kind — explain the idiomatic way, don't just dunk on my .clone()s. I'll read every comment and quietly Google what a lifetime is.

If the feature adds a lot of bloat, it should be a plugin.