Standardized Git Branches from the Status Bar

Tired of typing branch names by hand or forgetting your team’s conventions? Forks pins a branch creator to your status bar—pick a type, enter a title, and get a clean branch name like feature/main/new-ui-for-profile.

What is Forks?

Forks is a VS Code extension that creates structured git branches from a guided flow. Click Forks in the status bar, choose a type (e.g. feature, bug, hotfix), type a short title, and Forks slugifies it and runs git checkout -b type/baseBranch/slug for you.

Why Use Forks?

Consistent naming: Enforces a type/baseBranch/slug format so branches look the same across the team
Smart slugification: Turns titles like New UI for "User Profile"! into new-ui-for-user-profile
Context-aware: Uses your current branch as the base (e.g. feature/main/... when you’re on main)
Zero-clutter UI: One status bar item; the icon only appears when the workspace has a git repo
Customizable types: Add your own prefixes (e.g. refactor, docs, chore) in settings
Character limit: Optional max length for the slug so branch names stay readable (e.g. under 100 chars)

Getting Started

Installation

Open VS Code or Cursor
Go to the Extensions view
Search for Forks
Click Install

First Steps

Open a folder that is a git repository (Forks only shows its status bar icon when a .git folder exists)
Click the Forks icon in the status bar (or run Forks: Create structured branch from the Command Palette)
Pick a branch type (e.g. feature, bug, hotfix—or add more in settings)
Enter a title (e.g. New UI for User Profile page) and confirm—Forks creates and checks out the new branch

Commands

Forks: Create structured branch – Open the branch-creation flow (type → title → git checkout -b)

How It Works

Branch format

Branches are created as:

<type>/<baseBranch>/<slug>

Example: on main, choosing feature and title New UI for "User Profile" Page! produces:

feature/main/new-ui-for-user-profile-page

Settings

Configure Forks under the Forks Next section in settings (forks.next.*):

forks.next.types – Branch type prefixes in the picker (default: feature, bug, hotfix)
forks.next.maxSlugLength – Max length for the slug part (default: 80)
forks.next.statusBarLabel – Status bar text (default: $(git-branch) forks; Codicons supported)
forks.next.useLastSegmentAsBase – Use the last segment of the current branch as the base branch (default: false)

`forks.next.useLastSegmentAsBase`

When you work on a branch that already contains nested segments (e.g. feature/master/test), Forks normally uses the entire current branch name as the base, producing deeply nested results like:

feature/feature-master-test/my-new-feature

Enabling useLastSegmentAsBase tells Forks to use only the last segment (test) as the base branch instead:

feature/test/my-new-feature

Current branch	Disabled (default)	Enabled
`main`	`feature/main/...`	`feature/main/…` (unchanged)
`feature/master/test`	`feature/feature-master-test/...`	`feature/test/...`
`bug/hotfix/login-bug`	`feature/bug-hotfix-login-bug/...`	`feature/login-bug/...`

Slugification

Titles are lowercased and most non-alphanumeric characters become hyphens.
Dots (.) and underscores (_) are always preserved in the slug.

Examples:

Title input	Slug output
`New UI for "User Profile" Page!`	`new-ui-for-user-profile-page`
`fix login.page_v2`	`fix-login.page_v2`

Press F5 to launch the Extension Development Host.

Need Help?

Docs: See docs/README.md for overview, docs/architecture.md for data flow, and docs/configuration.md for settings
Issues: Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue on GitHub
Repository: github.com/2501224066/forks

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Made with ❤️ by PopoanFly

Forks Next