Session Isolation

Canary channel. This feature ships in gitswitch's canary builds. Run gitswitch beta to switch your install to canary (gitswitch stable switches back at any time).

The problem

gh (the GitHub CLI) only tracks one "active" account for your whole machine. Switching your gitswitch identity in one terminal silently flips which account every other open terminal's bare gh commands (gh pr create, gh issue list, gh repo view, ...) use too — even in a completely unrelated repo.

What it does

Turning on Session Isolation installs a gh shell function that wraps the real gh binary. Before every gh invocation, the wrapper resolves the right GitHub account for the repo you're in — the same resolution the HTTPS credential helper uses for pushes — and passes that account's token via GH_TOKEN for just that one command. gh's own global "active account" file is never read or written, so concurrent terminals never fight over it.

Session Isolation also gates repo pins: a pin only takes effect while it's on, since that's what actually keeps a pinned repo's identity separate from the rest of your machine.

Enable it

gitswitch install offers Session Isolation as a setup step, on by default for new installs. To turn it on later, open the TUI's Utilities tab:

gitswitch

Toggle Session Isolation on, then reload your shell (or open a new terminal) to pick up the wrapper.

Pinning a repo turns Session Isolation on automatically if it was off — gitswitch pin work just works, even before you've visited the Utilities tab.

How account resolution works

For each gh call, the wrapper works out which profile applies to the current repo — your global identity, a pinned repo, or a session override — and fetches that profile's stored token. If no account resolves (no gh-linked profile, or you're outside a git repo), the wrapper falls through to plain gh using your existing global account — no change in behavior.

If it's off

A pin set while Session Isolation is off doesn't disappear, but it doesn't apply either. gitswitch current, the TUI, and the shell prompt all show your global identity is active and note that the pin is present but inactive, instead of quietly trusting a local git config override that no longer means what it used to.

Turn it off

Toggle Session Isolation off in the Utilities tab, or run gitswitch uninstall to remove all shell integration at once. Either way the wrapper function is removed immediately, bare gh behaves exactly like it did before, and any repo pins go inactive as described above.

Troubleshooting

gh commands still use the wrong account after enabling

The wrapper is a shell function — a terminal opened before you turned the toggle on won't have it until its rc file is re-sourced:

source ~/.zshrc    # zsh
source ~/.bashrc   # bash
# or open a new terminal

Isolation seems to do nothing

The wrapper overrides the token used for a given call — it doesn't change what gh auth status reports, since that command reads gh's own global account list, which isolation intentionally never touches. Judge it by which account a gh command actually acted as, not by gh auth status.

A repo pin isn't being used

Check whether Session Isolation is on — a pin set while it's off is stored but inactive. Re-run gitswitch pin <nickname> to turn isolation on and re-apply the pin.

Next steps

• GitHub Account Sync — the --gh-user flag and gh auth switch on profile switch
• Identity Awareness — pins and per-repo identity resolution
• Shell Integration — everything else gitswitch install sets up