GitBell

GitHub notifications and pull requests, sorted by what you need to do.

Download for Mac View on GitHub

Free and open source · macOS 14 or later

GitBell's window showing Your turn: ten pull requests waiting, grouped into Review, Fix and Failed after merge, each with its checks, reviewers and how long it has waited.

Everything waiting on you, in one list.

GitBell groups your GitHub activity into reviews, fixes, replies, held CI jobs and merges, shows why each one needs you, and leaves out the rest. The Dock icon shows how many are waiting.

See which check broke.

Each row names the failing checks, requested changes and missing reviewers, so you can see what to fix before opening it.

The Fix group: Upgrade to Rails 8.1 with rspec (3/8) and rubocop failing, and Cache search results with changes requested by bob.

Your pull requests, by stage.

From draft to deployed, with what each one is waiting on and for how long.

Stage counts: Drafts 1, In review 4, Fix 2, Merge 2.

Notifications.

For review requests, failing checks, requested changes, pull requests ready to merge, deploys, and checks that fail after a merge.

Stacks stay together.

Pull requests built on each other's branches are shown together, in merge order. You can also approve held CircleCI jobs from the list.

A stack of two pull requests, the second waiting on the approve_staging CircleCI job.

Timelines.

Each pull request's history, from opening to deploy, with how long each step took.

  1. Opened
  2. Review
  3. Checks
  4. Merged
  5. Deployed

Example timings.

A native Mac app.

Written in Swift and SwiftUI and laid out like Mail: a sidebar of pages and groups with counts, and search at the top. It supports light and dark mode, and Liquid Glass on macOS 26.

GitBell in dark mode showing Your pull requests, grouped by stage from Drafts to Shipped.

  • Menu bar

    An optional menu bar icon opens the window or a compact popover.

  • Filters

    Choose which organisations to include, whether to show personal repositories, and whose activity counts.

  • Keyboard shortcuts

    Every action is in the menus, with its shortcut.

Install.

  1. Download

    Drag GitBell to Applications. It updates itself with Sparkle.

    Download for Mac

  2. Open it

    GitBell isn't notarised yet, so macOS blocks it the first time. In System Settings → Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway, or run:

    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/GitBell.app

  3. Sign in

    GitBell uses your GitHub CLI login if you have one. Otherwise paste a classic personal access token with notifications, repo and read:org. It's kept in your Keychain. A CircleCI token is optional, for approving held jobs.

Privacy.

There's no GitBell server. The app talks to GitHub directly from your Mac.

  • Keychain

    Your GitHub and CircleCI tokens are kept in the macOS Keychain.

  • Usage data

    Release builds send anonymous usage counts and crash reports, without your token or any names. You can turn this off in Settings → General → Privacy.

  • Open source

    MIT licensed. You can build it yourself with Xcode and XcodeGen; builds from source send no data.

Download GitBell

Free, for macOS 14 and later.

Download for Mac Release notes