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.
Working in a browser instead, or setting up a machine with no display? The web UI runs straight from npm — npx @avantmedia/specforge — with no download and no unsigned-binary prompt to clear. See Getting specforge-serve.
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 an OpenSpec workspace”.
If the folder is a git repository, SpecForge discovers the repository’s other worktrees automatically — you register the repository once, not each worktree. See Workspaces.
4. Read the badge
The badge counts open changes across every enabled 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.
Where that count appears depends on the platform. On macOS it is drawn as a digit beside the menu-bar icon, and mirrored on the Dock tile. On Windows and Linux the tray icon switches between its idle and active marks, and the count itself lives in the icon’s tooltip — hover to read it.
First look: the Dashboard
Clicking the tray icon opens onto the Dashboard — what shipped today, what is in flight, and a live graph of today’s commits — with the change browser one click away in the tree on the left.
The format it reads
SpecForge reads OpenSpec workspaces. It renders what is on disk and never writes to your projects. The only things it ever writes are its own configuration and its activity log — settings, the workspace registry, the achievement record — all stored in app data, outside any workspace. See Settings.