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SDF v0.2.0: Merge, Fetch, and a Real UI

SDF v0.2.0 adds sdf merge and sdf fetch, drift detection in status, polished terminal output with the Charm ecosystem, and a dozen quality-of-life improvements.

Pavel Pascari ·

If you've worked with stacked PRs, you know the pain isn't creating the stack — it's everything after. Rebasing cascades, retargeting bases, keeping descriptions in sync, merging without GitHub auto-closing your downstream PRs. SDF handles all of that.

v0.2.0 rounds out the workflow with the pieces that were still missing: a merge command that understands stacks, the ability to import existing PR chains, drift detection, and a polished terminal UI.

sdf merge — land PRs without breaking the chain

Here's the problem with merging stacked PRs on GitHub: when you merge a PR and its branch gets deleted, GitHub sees the downstream PR's base disappear and auto-closes it. You lose review threads. To avoid that, you have to manually retarget the next PR's base before merging, then cascade-rebase the rest of the stack.

sdf merge handles all of this in one command:

sdf merge

SDF finds the head PR in the stack, retargets the downstream PR's base before merging (so GitHub doesn't close it), squash-merges via gh, and triggers a cascade sync for the remaining branches. The default is squash merge — pass --method merge or --method rebase if your team prefers a different strategy.

sdf fetch — import stacks from GitHub

Say a colleague has a stack of PRs up for review and you need to pick up their work — or you want to start managing an existing chain of PRs with SDF without recreating anything. sdf fetch turns PR chains already on GitHub into a managed stack:

sdf fetch

It scans open PRs, detects branch chains (A → main, B → A, C → B), presents them for confirmation, checks out any missing branches locally, and builds the stack metadata. If you already have a local stack that overlaps, it reconciles — adding new branches, updating PR numbers, flagging anything that looks like drift.

No manual setup, no reconstructing state — clone the repo, run sdf fetch, and the full stack topology is there.

Drift detection

sdf status talks to GitHub. It polls PR state and compares it against the local stack metadata. If someone retargets a PR's base on GitHub, or a PR gets closed outside of SDF, status flags it:

  my-stack  (base: main)

   ✓  db-schema       PR #142  merged
   ●  repository      PR #143  open    3 commits ahead, in sync
 → ●  controller      PR #144  open    1 commits ahead, needs sync

  ⚠ Drift detected:
    PR #143 (repository) base is main, expected db-schema

  Run `sdf fetch` to reconcile.

Routine changes (like a merged PR) are applied automatically. Notable drift — things that suggest someone changed the stack structure outside of SDF — are surfaced as warnings so you can decide what to do.

Terminal UI built on Charm

SDF uses the Charm ecosystem — the same libraries that power the GitHub CLI's terminal output — so the CLI feels like a tool that respects your attention:

  • Consistent color language — green for merged, cyan for current branch, yellow for warnings, magenta for PR numbers. Every command uses the same palette.
  • Interactive prompts — conflict resolution, merge confirmation, and stack selection use arrow-key navigation.
  • Scannable output — ✓, ✗, ⚠, → make it easy to spot what needs your attention at a glance.

The UI is deliberately restrained. SDF is a command-and-exit CLI, not an interactive dashboard. The Charm libraries give it polish without turning it into something you have to learn to navigate.

Everything else

A lot of smaller improvements shipped alongside the headline features:

  • PR title generation — sdf pr auto-generates titles from branch names, with optional conventional commit detection from your commit history
  • --json output — sdf pr --json and sdf init --json return structured output for scripting and AI agent integration
  • Branch insertion — sdf branch inserts at your current checkout position in the stack, so new work slots in where it makes sense
  • sdf move — move commits from the current branch to its parent when you realize work landed on the wrong layer
  • sdf register — register existing PR chains as SDF stacks without recreating branches
  • Configurable branch prefixes — control whether branches are auto-prefixed with the stack name, customize the separator, or disable it entirely
  • Multiple stacks per repo — work on independent feature stacks in the same repository

Get started

brew install pavelpascari/tap/sdf
sdf doctor

If you're already working with stacked PRs and manual rebasing, try sdf fetch to import your existing PR chains. If you're starting fresh, the Getting Started guide walks through the full workflow.

SDF is fully open source. Feedback and bug reports are welcome on the GitHub repo.

Post updated on 2026-02-24: sdf init has been renamed to sdf new. The old command still works as a backward-compatible alias. Code examples in this post reflect the original v0.2.0 interface.