Sift documentation

Getting started

Installation Install on macOS, Linux, Windows, or FreeBSD, or build from source. Usage Commands, output destinations, filtering, and examples.

Features in depth

Interactive picker The dual-pane TUI — navigation, per-file modes, and task prompts. Configuration and profiles Flags, .sift.toml profiles, and how precedence works. Output formats and prompts The four styles, signature mode, and clipboard output. Incremental deltas Feed an LLM only what changed since the last dump. Dependency expansion Auto-include imports of selected files as compressed context. MCP server Expose sift to coding agents over stdio.

Sift turns a project directory into a single, LLM-friendly context document. It walks the tree, honors .gitignore, and renders the selected files in plain, Markdown, JSON, or XML — with token budgeting, secret redaction, signature-only compression, and Git-relevance ranking so the most important context fits in a model’s window.

Command cheat-sheet

Command	What it does
sift	Open the interactive picker (bare invocation)
sift dump [path]	Render the whole eligible tree to codebase.md
sift pick [path]	Select files interactively, then render
sift select [path]	Auto-select useful files and render them
sift diff [ref]	Render only files changed relative to a Git ref
sift delta [path]	Render only changes since the last recorded dump
sift watch [path]	Re-render the document whenever files change
sift mcp [path]	Start an MCP server over stdio for coding agents

Every command accepts --help; sift --help lists the shared flags.

New to Sift? Start with Usage and run sift dump . --output - to see a context document for the current directory.