Nifty Branches

Safely clean up merged, squash-merged, gone and stale git branches, with a preview and one-click restore.

Maintained. No sign-in. No telemetry. Works in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium and other editors that use Open VSX.

Why

After a few months every repo has dozens of old local branches. git branch --merged only finds some of them, because branches merged with squash and merge on GitHub or GitLab don't count as merged to git. Deleting by hand is tedious, and scripts that delete for you are scary.

Features

• See before you delete. Clean Up Branches lists every local branch with the reason it can go and when it was last touched:
  • merged: fully merged into the default branch
  • squash-merged: its changes landed on the default branch via squash and merge
  • remote branch deleted: its upstream was deleted (for example after the PR was merged)
  • stale: no commits for 90 days (configurable)
• Sensible suggestions. Merged, squash-merged and gone branches are pre-selected. Stale-only branches and branches with unpushed commits are listed but not ticked.
• Never touches what matters. The branch you're on, the default branch and protected branches (main, master, develop, release/*, hotfix/* by default) are never offered.
• Undo, any time. An Undo button appears right after cleaning up, and Restore Deleted Branch brings back any branch deleted with Nifty Branches, at its exact commit.
• Up to date. Runs git fetch --prune first, so branches deleted on the remote are detected.
• Also in the Source Control view's … menu.

Nifty Branches only deletes local branches. It never deletes anything on your remote.

Commands

Settings

Install

• VS Code: search for "Nifty Branches" in the Extensions view, or install from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
• Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, Kiro, Antigravity: install from Open VSX.

Privacy

This extension collects no telemetry and needs no account. It only runs git locally (plus git fetch, which talks to your own remote).

More Nifty tools

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See all 28 Nifty tools at https://getnifty.dev