Stale

A macOS menu bar app that shows your open GitHub pull requests, sorted by how long they've been rotting.
Most PR tools show you what's new. Stale shows you what you've been ignoring.

Quiet until it isn't

Stale works like any good monitoring system: silent when everything is fine, impossible to miss when it isn't.

	Everything is fresh or merely aging. A plain clock sits in the menu bar and keeps to itself. No badge, no count, nothing to look at.
	Something has crossed into stale territory. The clock takes on the colour of your worst PR, orange for stale and red for rotten, and picks up a count of how many need you.

No news is good news. When the clock is plain, you have nothing to do here.

Tiers

Every open PR you've authored lands in one of four tiers based on its age. The thresholds are yours to change.

Tier	Default	Menu bar
Fresh	0–2 days	plain clock
Aging	3–6 days	plain clock
Stale	7–13 days	orange clock with count
Rotten	14+ days	red clock with count

Age is measured in days open by default. Switch it to days since last activity if you'd rather be nagged about PRs nobody has touched than PRs that are simply old.

What each PR shows

• Repository and title, with a Draft tag where relevant.
• PR number and author.
• Review state: approved, changes requested, or review pending.
• Checks on the head commit as a passed-of-total count, green when they've all passed, red when one has failed.
• Age in days, coloured by tier, with the other clock (idle or open) alongside when it differs.

Clicking a PR opens it in your browser.

Install

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel. Releases are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the app opens with a normal double-click.

1. Download the latest Stale-x.y.z.dmg from Releases and drag Stale to Applications.
2. Make sure the GitHub CLI is signed in: brew install gh && gh auth login.
3. Open Stale, click the clock in the menu bar, then Settings, then Sign in with GitHub CLI.

That's it. Stale stores no credentials of its own: on each refresh it asks gh auth token, so there are no tokens to create and no Keychain prompts. gh auth logout signs Stale out too.

Don't use the GitHub CLI? Paste a classic personal access token with the repo scope, plus read:org for organization repositories. Pasted tokens are kept in the macOS Keychain.

Settings

• Staleness: measure by days open or days since last activity, and adjust the tier thresholds.
• Organizations: untick any organization, or your personal account, to hide its PRs.
• Refresh: poll interval from 5 minutes to 1 hour, and whether to hide drafts.

If GitHub rate-limits you or you're offline, the last result stays visible with a small warning.

What it accesses

Stale talks to exactly one host: the GitHub API at api.github.com, or your Enterprise Server if you change the API base. No telemetry, no analytics, no other network calls.

• GitHub CLI sign-in reuses the token gh already holds. Stale runs gh auth token on each refresh and never writes the token to disk, so whatever scopes your gh login has are the scopes Stale can use.
• Pasted tokens are stored in your login Keychain as Stale – GitHub token, and nowhere else.
• Cached PR data (titles, repository names, numbers, timestamps, check counts) is written unencrypted to ~/Library/Application Support/Stale/pull-requests.json so the dropdown is populated instantly on launch and stays useful offline. No token is ever written to it. Delete the file to clear it.
• If your organization enforces SAML SSO, a classic personal access token has to be SSO-authorized for that organization or its pull requests come back empty with no visible error. The GitHub CLI path avoids this.

How it works

One GraphQL request per poll (is:pr is:open author:@me, up to 100 PRs) returns each PR's review decision, the check runs and statuses on its head commit, and the organizations you belong to. Age is computed locally and re-evaluated every minute, so tiers roll over between polls.

Stale/
├── StaleApp.swift        MenuBarExtra + Settings scene
├── Models/               PullRequest, RepoOwner, AppSettings
├── GitHub/               GraphQL client, GitHub CLI token import
├── Keychain/             Keychain wrapper (pasted tokens only)
├── Staleness/            Tiers, thresholds, sorting — pure functions
├── Store/                PRStore (polling, cache), SettingsStore
└── Views/                Menu bar label, dropdown, PR row, settings

Build from source

Requires macOS 14+ and Xcode 16+. Open Stale.xcodeproj and press ⌘R. No dependencies.

xcodebuild -project Stale.xcodeproj -scheme Stale build

Releasing

Bump MARKETING_VERSION in Version.xcconfig and push to main. GitHub Actions builds, signs, notarizes, and publishes a DMG release. See docs/RELEASING.md for the one-time secret setup.

License

MIT