PR Review 2.0, a local secrets scanner, and smarter PR badges: GitWand v3.5
@gitwand/desktop@3.5.0 bundles two chunks of work that were originally planned as separate releases, shipped together instead: a ground-up rebuild of in-app PR review, and a new pre-commit secrets scanner. Both were benchmark- and audit-driven, both are entirely local by default, and both target the same thing — catching what matters before it becomes a problem, without getting in your way.
Alongside them: branch badges that finally see past the first page of open PRs, a real PR count on the dock, and a couple of small UI fixes.
PR review, rebuilt around keyboard and speed
The in-app pull request review (last touched in v2.24) gets a ground-up rebuild. A GitHub-standard keymap now drives the whole flow — J/K to move hunk by hunk, ⇧J/⇧K to jump file to file, V to mark something viewed, ⇧V to hide what you've already seen, C to comment where your cursor sits, N/P to cycle AI findings, ⌘Enter to submit. A review that used to mean constant mouse trips can now happen almost entirely from the keyboard.
Files you've reviewed stay marked as viewed — invalidated honestly at the whole-PR level when the head SHA changes, so a re-push resets your progress instead of silently keeping stale marks. A draft review's comments now survive you navigating away and back, visible as a running count before you submit. Dismissing a review or requesting reviewers is one click from the Info tab instead of a trip to GitHub, on forges that support it — GitLab, which has no direct review-dismissal equivalent, just hides the action instead of throwing.
Big pull requests were the pain point this rebuild targeted directly: diffs now load per file instead of all at once, and even a single huge file renders through a virtualized view instead of dumping every line into the DOM. Reopening a PR you already had cached now costs three calls to the forge instead of six.
An AI reviewer that reads the whole picture, not just the diff
GitWand can now run a local, opt-in AI pass over a pull request the moment you open it — not just line by line over the diff, but by first tracing which files import the changed code and pulling the history of the touched lines, the same multi-hop trick tools like Greptile charge for. Findings come back with a confidence score and a threshold you control, capped and remembering your per-finding dismissals, computed in the background so opening a PR never blocks on it. Switch PRs mid-run and the in-flight pass aborts cleanly.
A generated summary — what changed, why, which areas it touches — sits at the top of the Info tab before you read a single line of diff, and doubles as a review handoff. Underneath, CI check-run annotations, the AI's findings, and the existing static heuristic flags now render through one shared gutter-overlay model instead of three separate code paths bolted together over time.
GitLab's review methods, the largest remaining stub gap, are now real: inline batch comments anchor correctly via a dedicated diff-refs lookup, listReviews reflects actual approval/changes-requested state, and per-path comment counts are real instead of placeholder zeros.
A secrets scanner that never leaves your machine
Inspired by GitSquid's pre-commit scanner — but with zero network dependency, everything local. Before you commit, GitWand can now scan every added line for the shape of a secret: AWS, GCP, Azure and GitHub tokens (ghp_, github_pat_), GitLab (glpat-), Slack, Stripe, OpenAI and Anthropic keys, RSA/OpenSSH/EC/PGP private-key headers, JWTs, and high-entropy literals that just look too random to be real code.
It's deliberately non-blocking by default: find something, and you get an orange badge in the commit area and a confirmation you can bypass, not a wall. Turn it into a hard stop with an opt-in pre-commit hook (Settings → Hooks) if your team wants one — always escapable with git commit --no-verify when you really mean it. Extend or quiet specific patterns per-repo through .gitwandrc's secrets.patterns[] / secrets.ignore[].
The matcher itself is dual-implemented on purpose: Rust's regex crate for the packaged desktop app, a pure TypeScript mirror in @gitwand/core for pnpm dev:web and the CLI, locked in sync by a parity test so the two never quietly diverge. The same engine ships as gitwand scan [--json] [--strict] in the CLI.
Branch badges that see the whole picture
The small #1234 badge that shows up on a branch with an open PR used to only ever look at the first page of results — a repo with more than ten open PRs could have one and never show a badge for it. GitWand now keeps draining pages quietly in the background after the first paint, the same git-log-style prefetch pattern used for the commit graph, and remembers what it found so reopening a repo restores the list instantly instead of starting cold again. Non-GitHub forges get the breadth fix too; the instant-restore fast path stays GitHub-only for now.
The dock's PR counter, previously stuck at whatever happened to already be loaded (often 0 until you opened the branch popover), now wires the existing forge-abstracted PR-count call and shows a real number on repo open and on manual refresh.
The rest of the release
- Repo tabs: reorder with any input — tab drag-to-reorder was mouse-event-only; it now uses pointer events (mouse, touch, pen), plus keyboard support for accessible reordering.
- File Explorer: Save button moved — grouped next to the lock toggle with the other primary edit action, instead of sitting after Undo/Blame.
- Azure comment safety —
updateComment/deleteCommentaren't supported on Azure DevOps yet; the UI now hides the affordance instead of calling into a forge method that would throw.
Download GitWand 3.5.0 for macOS, Linux, or Windows from GitHub Releases, or read the full changelog. For the complete PR review and security feature set, see the features page.