Getting started
SpecForge lives in your menu bar, system tray, or status area and shows every change in flight across the workspaces you register. Setup is four steps.
1. Install
Grab the build for your platform from the latest release. Releases are unsigned, so the first launch needs one extra click — see Troubleshooting for the exact path on each operating system.
2. Launch it
SpecForge appears in your menu bar (macOS), system tray (Windows), or status area (Linux). There is no Dock-only window to hunt for. Click the tray icon to open the main window.
3. Add a workspace
Open Settings — the gear in the sidebar footer — and choose + Add workspace. Pick any folder containing an openspec/ directory. A folder without one is rejected as “not a valid OpenSpec workspace.”
If the folder is a git repository, SpecForge discovers its sibling worktrees automatically — you do not add them one by one. See Workspaces.
4. Read the badge
The badge counts non-archived logical changes across every registered workspace. A change being worked on in several git worktrees counts once, not once per worktree. At zero, the badge is hidden entirely, so a number always means something is open.
The format it reads
SpecForge reads OpenSpec workspaces. It renders what is on disk and never writes to them — see Settings for the one exception, which is SpecForge’s own configuration rather than your project.