Colour schemes, shortcuts and settings
Make Mergepond look the way you want and know every key it answers to. You will pick a colour scheme, decide whether it follows macOS light and dark, learn the shortcuts worth memorising, and find the three things in Settings: your licence, updates and what Mergepond shares.
Pick a colour scheme
- Choose View › Appearance…, or press ⌘K and type "appearance". The sheet says "Pick a colour scheme. Workspace colours and the commit graph adapt to it."
- Four tiles show a small preview each. Pond is the default, deep water and teal. Light is white and neutral greys with teal only for actions; Dark is the same idea on neutral dark greys; Greyscale is plain greys where only added and removed lines keep their colour.
- Click a tile, or move between them with the arrow keys. The app changes under the sheet as you go.
- Below the tiles, "Switch between Light and Dark with macOS" is on by default and follows the system setting. Picking a scheme by hand turns it off; tick it again to go back to following macOS.
The scheme is per Mac, not per repository or workspace. Workspace colours stay recognisable in every scheme, which is the point of them.
Learn the shortcuts
Mergepond's shortcuts follow the macOS pattern, so most of them you already know. These are the ones that pay back the effort of learning.
Moving around
- ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3: Changes, History, Worktrees.
- ⌘K: command palette. ⌘P: switch repository or worktree. ⌘T: open one in a new tab.
- ⌘⇧] and ⌘⇧[: next and previous tab. ⌃Tab works too.
- ⌘⌥S: sidebar. ⌘⌥I: inspector.
- Esc: close whatever is on top.
Doing things
- ⌘⏎: commit the staged changes.
- Space in the Changes list: stage or unstage the selected file.
- ⌘F: find in History.
- ⌘⌥F, ⌘⇧↓, ⌘⇧↑: fetch, pull, push.
- ⌘⇧B: new branch. ⌘N: new worktree. ⌘⇧N: new worktree from a pull request.
- ⌘⇧R: show in Finder. ⌘⌥T: open in Terminal.
Files and windows
- ⌘O: open a repository. ⌘W: close the tab. ⌘⇧W: close the window. ⌘,: Settings.
The full table is in the docs under keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts are not customisable yet.
Settings
Press ⌘,. The sheet has three sections.
Licence. On Free, it reads "Mergepond Free includes 3 workspaces. Pro adds remote repos over SSH, unlimited workspaces and the worktree board, for a one-time price at mergepond.dev." Paste the key from your receipt email into the field (it starts with MP1.) and click Activate. Activating checks the key with mergepond.dev once; after that it works offline. On Pro, the section shows who the licence is for and until when new features are included, with "Deactivate this Mac" to move the licence to another computer.
Updates. Mergepond checks for updates when it opens. "Check now" asks again; when one is available, "Install and relaunch" does both. Mergepond › Check for Updates… is the same thing from the menu.
Privacy. "Share anonymous usage analytics" is off until you turn it on. When on, Mergepond sends a few events, the app opened, a workspace or worktree was added, an update was installed, with a random install id. Never repository names, paths, branches, remotes or code, and no session recording. Everything else Mergepond does stays on your Mac and the machines you connect to; there is no cloud copy of anything.
Get more from it
- "Use the Dark colour scheme" and its siblings are palette commands, so a scheme change is ⌘K, "dark", ⏎.
- Pick Greyscale when you are presenting or screen-sharing diffs: the only colour on screen is the change itself.
- A Pro licence covers up to three Macs at a time, so activate on the laptop too. "Deactivate this Mac" frees a slot when you retire one.
- Students and open-source maintainers get Pro free: see free Pro.