reshelf

I opened my GitHub stars and realized it was a graveyard. Hundreds of repos collected with real intent, buried in a flat, endless list I never reopened. Some I had cloned — most I hadn't — and I couldn't remember which was which. The ones I had cloned were scattered in random folders, slowly going out of date, with no quick way to see what I had or what I had forgotten.

reshelf is a small macOS app for the repos worth keeping. Paste a GitHub URL into Quick Capture, and it fetches the metadata and drops the repo into a local catalog, auto-categorized with no AI involved. From there, you sort it onto a shelf with a keystroke, clone it with a right-click, and the files land in a predictable folder organized by category. It is a librarian for your open-source habit, not a discovery feed.

What's on the shelf

reshelf has three shelves. Top Shelf is for the keepers — the repos you actively use or want close. The Collector is for the rest. Yard Sale is for the ones you are letting go. You sort with a keystroke. The sidebar filters by shelf, category, or Cloned, so you can see at a glance what you have and what you meant to clone and never did.

• Capture a repo by pasting its GitHub URL — reshelf fetches the metadata and auto-categorizes it with no AI
• Sort onto Top Shelf, The Collector, or Yard Sale with a keystroke
• Clone locally into ~/reshelf/repos/<Category>/<repo>, organized so a whole category is easy to hand to a coding agent

How it works

You paste a GitHub URL into Quick Capture (⌘K). reshelf fetches the repo's name, description, and license, guesses a category, and drops it into your catalog. The catalog lives in a SwiftData store at ~/reshelf/catalog.store with automatic JSON backups — it is just files on your Mac, nothing leaving the machine.

I wanted something closer to a shelf I could walk past: a clear view of what I'd kept, what I'd cloned, and what I'd meant to clone and never did.

Staying current

A read-only update check compares each clone against its upstream and flags the ones with changes to pull. You can pull one at a time or all at once. reshelf also reads each repo's license and explains it in plain language, with a quiet caution for copyleft ones.

1. Capture — paste a GitHub URL into Quick Capture (⌘K). reshelf fetches the metadata and categorizes the repo automatically.
2. Sort — move it to the right shelf with a keystroke. Filter the sidebar by shelf, category, or Cloned.
3. Clone — right-click to clone. The files go into ~/reshelf/repos/<Category>/<repo>, predictable and ready.

Where it is now

reshelf is at v1 and it is the app I open every day. The main path stays deliberately simple: capture, sort, clone, update. There is a v2 Intelligence preview behind a setting — clone analysis, compare, ecosystems — off by default while the main app stays fast. The intent is to keep those two things separate until the preview is ready to stand on its own.