Installing wt
Installing wt
wt ships as a single self-contained Go binary — the only runtime dependency
is git. Pick the install path that fits your setup, then wire up the shell
wrapper so the “Open here” menu option can actually cd your shell.
Homebrew (preferred)
brew install sahil87/tap/wtThis pulls the latest release from the
sahil87/homebrew-tap formula. To
upgrade later, wt update self-updates via Homebrew (see the
workflows reference).
Manual (requires Go and just)
git clone https://github.com/sahil87/wt
cd wt
just local-install # builds bin/wt and copies it to ~/.local/bin/wtjust local-install compiles bin/wt (stamping the version from
git describe --tags --always) and copies it to ~/.local/bin/wt. For this to
put wt on your PATH, ~/.local/bin must already be in PATH. Binaries
installed this way are not managed by Homebrew, so wt update will tell you
to reinstall via brew rather than attempting a self-update.
Shell wrapper (enables “Open here”)
A child process can’t change its parent shell’s directory — that’s a Unix
constraint, not a wt limitation. To make wt open’s “Open here” menu option
cd your current shell, add the wrapper to your shell profile
(~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc):
eval "$(wt shell-init)"wt shell-init prints a bash/zsh wrapper function that reads WT_CD_FILE after
each wt invocation and runs cd in the parent shell when that file is
non-empty. Without it, “Open here” falls back to printing a cd -- '<path>'
line you can copy. See the gotchas for the full story.
Already use other sahil87 tools?
If you have other tools from the toolkit installed,
shll shell-install
wires up all of their shell integrations and autocompletions at once — including
the wt wrapper above — so you don’t have to add each eval line by hand.
Where wt came from
wt was originally extracted from
fab-kit, which bundled the worktree helper
alongside its other binaries. It now lives in its own repo
(sahil87/wt) and is released independently;
the fab-kit repo continues to bundle a copy during the transition.
Next steps
- Workflows & command reference — every flag, the
--basestart-point rules, thewt openlauncher matrix, and in-depth gotchas.