A git sidekick for VS Code: chat with your model in the sidebar, generate commit messages, and create branches. Works with Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Ollama, LM Studio, and more.
Installation
Launch VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P), paste the following command, and press enter.
GitMate is a git sidekick for VS Code. It puts a chat with your model right in the sidebar, writes commit messages from your diff, and creates branches through a quick dialog. Bring your own model, cloud or local.
What you get
A chat panel in the activity bar (its own GitMate icon). It is just the chat: ask your model anything, with replies that stream in as they are written and a Stop button to cut one short. The input sits at the bottom with a provider picker and a send button, in the style of Copilot Chat.
Settings, reached from the gear in the panel's toolbar. It opens over the chat with two tabs:
Settings: pick a provider, set the model and base URL, and store your API key. The key lives in the VS Code secret store, not in a settings file.
About: what GitMate is and what it does.
A back arrow returns you to the chat.
Generate Commit Message button in the Source Control title bar: sends your diff to the model and drops a commit message into the message box.
Create Branch button in the Source Control title bar: a small dialog with a base-branch picker and a live preview of the branch that will be made.
Providers
GitMate speaks to a range of services. Most of them use the OpenAI chat format under the hood, so adding your own is usually just a base URL away.
Provider
Type
Needs key
Anthropic Claude
cloud
yes
OpenAI
cloud
yes
OpenRouter
cloud
yes
Groq
cloud
yes
Together AI
cloud
yes
DeepSeek
cloud
yes
Mistral
cloud
yes
Google Gemini
cloud
yes
LM Studio
local
no
Ollama
local
no
Custom OpenAI-compatible
either
optional
Each provider remembers its own model and base URL. Use Test connection to check your setup, and Fetch models to list what an endpoint offers (or what you have pulled locally).
How it works
Chat
The chat tab sends your conversation to the active provider and streams the reply back into the panel. Anthropic uses the official SDK; OpenAI-style services and Ollama are called over their streaming HTTP APIs.
Generate Commit Message
Reads the staged diff, and falls back to the working-tree diff when nothing is staged.
Sends it to the active provider with a short prompt.
Writes the result into the Source Control message box.
If the active provider needs a key and none is set, it points you to the Settings tab.
Create Branch
Opens a dialog with a base-branch picker (local and remote branches, default branch preselected), a name field, a live preview, and inline validation.
Creates and checks out the branch from the chosen base.
Setup
npm install
Press F5 (Run GitMate) to launch an Extension Development Host, or run npm run compile and package with vsce package.
Click the GitMate icon in the activity bar, open the Settings tab, pick a provider, fill in the fields, run Test connection, then Save.
Settings reference
Setting
Default
Description
gitmate.activeProvider
anthropic
Which provider GitMate uses.
gitmate.providers
empty
Per-provider model and base URL. Blank entries fall back to defaults.
gitmate.commitMessageInstructions
Conventional Commits prompt
Extra instructions added to the commit prompt.
gitmate.maxDiffBytes
100000
Diff size cap. Larger diffs are truncated with a warning.
API keys are never stored in settings. They live in the VS Code secret store, set from the Settings tab.
Notes
The Source Control buttons appear when a Git repository is open (scmProvider == git).
GitMate depends on the built-in vscode.git extension and uses its public API.
Cloud providers and local servers are called with the fetch built into the VS Code runtime; Anthropic uses @anthropic-ai/sdk.
