GitHub for Nova

A native GitHub integration for Nova that brings issues and pull requests into your sidebar — with full read/write capabilities and smart caching to avoid rate limits.

This extension is still in early development. Use with caution — although rate limit protection is built in, you may still encounter GitHub API limits under heavy usage.

Features

• Browse Repositories View and switch between configured GitHub repositories directly from the sidebar.

• Issues & Pull Requests See open and closed issues and PRs in real time, including:

  • Author, assignees, labels, milestone
  • Comments (up to 25 lines previewed)
  • Special status: duplicate, not planned, completed, merged, etc.
  • Draft status for pull requests

• Auto-Refresh with Smart Throttling Refreshes automatically at your defined interval — but only if needed. Skips API calls if data was recently fetched.

• Caching & Offline Support Caches everything to disk:

  • Issues and PRs
  • Comments and review comments
  • ETags to minimize bandwidth Falls back to cached data when rate-limited or offline.

• Actions

  • Create new issue or pull request
  • Close or reopen issues (with reason support)
  • Open any item in the browser
  • Copy URLs for sharing

• Secure Token Storage Your GitHub token is stored in the macOS Keychain. Never in plaintext.

Notes

• Pull requests are enhanced with merge and draft info via an extra API call per PR.
• The extension avoids unnecessary requests and skips fetching if the view is unchanged.
• Supports both public and private repositories (as long as the token is valid).

Multiple Accounts (Work & Personal)

Automatic detection: when you open a project that is a GitHub checkout, the extension reads its .git/config and offers the repo:

• If it belongs to your configured account and is in your Repositories list, it becomes this workspace's active repo automatically.
• If it belongs to a different account (e.g. a work organization) or is not in your list, a one-time notification asks whether to use it in this workspace.

Detected repositories are stored by the extension itself — nothing is written to Nova's settings or the project's .nova folder. To remove one, right-click its row in the Repositories section and choose Forget Detection.

The GitHub Username and Repositories settings can still be overridden per Nova workspace manually. Nova reads the workspace value first and falls back to the global setting:

1. Open the project that should use a different account.
2. Go to Project Settings → Extensions → GitHub.
3. Set GitHub Username (e.g. your work organization) and the Repositories list for that workspace.

Tokens are stored in the macOS Keychain per username, so each account uses its own Personal Access Token automatically — paste the matching token once per account. The token setting itself is deliberately global-only: workspace configuration lives in the project's .nova folder, which is often checked into source control, and tokens are never written there.

🔒 Privacy

All authentication is handled via your own GitHub token. No external servers or tracking.