How syncing works

GitNomad keeps your phone and your computer in step through a small cloud sync service. This page explains what actually happens, so the behavior makes sense.

The golden rule: your computer is the source of truth

Your real git repository lives on your computer. GitNomad never replaces it — it carries changes to and from it. The cloud sync service is just a store-and-forward relay: it holds changes long enough to pass them between your devices, so your phone and computer don’t have to be online at the exact same moment.

“Push” means push-to-desktop

In GitNomad, Push sends your phone’s edit to your computer, not to GitHub. When you push:

1. The sync service turns your edit into a git commit.
2. Your computer picks it up and fast-forwards its local repo.

Your history stays clean: a commit is created once and moved by its exact identity (its SHA), never re-created. So what you see on the phone and what lands on your computer are the same commit.

Want to push to GitHub too? That’s a separate action routed through your computer — your desktop still owns the git push to your remote.

The two directions

Phone → computer. You edit and save a file on the phone. GitNomad commits it via the sync service; your computer pulls it in.

Computer → phone. You edit in VS Code. The change reaches the phone two ways:

• On commit — when you commit on your computer, the phone sees the new commit.
• Live drafts — even before you commit, when you save a file in VS Code (or your editor autosaves), GitNomad shows that unsaved working copy on the phone within a few seconds. This lets you glance at your latest work from your pocket without committing first.

Drafts are content-only previews; structural changes (creating or deleting files) travel on a commit.

What needs to be online

On the free plan, your computer does the real git work. So for changes to flow, your computer needs to be on, with VS Code open and the GitNomad extension running and linked.

If your computer is offline, your phone edits are safely queued in the sync service and delivered the moment your computer reconnects — nothing is lost. The phone shows a pending badge until then.

When both sides change the same thing

If you edit a file on the phone and your computer commits a change to the same lines before syncing, that’s a genuine divergence. GitNomad doesn’t dump raw git conflict markers on you — it shows a simple green/red review. See Reviewing merges.

Non-overlapping changes (different files, or different parts of a file) merge automatically and silently.

Polling and timing

The phone checks for updates every few seconds while a repo is open, so expect changes to appear within roughly 2–4 seconds, not instantly. Pull down on a list to refresh immediately.

Next: Running code · Reviewing merges · Troubleshooting