Release Notes Improved

• wt step prune removes worktrees far faster: Each removal ran a serial chain of ~17 git subprocesses under the scan write lock, re-preparing a plan the scan had already computed and re-stating the worktree right after the fsmonitor daemon stop. The chain is now one check per guarantee, reusing the scan-time plan, and removals run concurrently on the scan lock's read side — the write side is kept for the candidates that need it (hook-bearing, --foreground, metadata-pruning, and the current worktree). The documented rust-scale live prune of 24 candidates goes from ~12 s to ~0.6 s wall, and the prune_e2e/live benchmark from ~620 ms to ~400 ms. (#3617, #3631)
• wt step prune --format=json is ordered, and a failed removal aborts the rest: Live JSON output is now sorted by scan index, matching --dry-run, with the current worktree last. The first failing removal drains the remaining queue unexecuted, matching the serial loop it replaced; in-flight removals complete. (#3631)
• A worktree can be named by its path wherever a branch is accepted: Every argument that takes a branch now also accepts the worktree's own path, resolved after the branch so a directory never shadows a branch sharing its name. A path names what a branch cannot — a detached worktree, or one of two checkouts of the same branch. Relative paths resolve against -C and a leading ~ against the home directory, so a path worktrunk printed can be pasted back. Docs (#3607)
• wt list flags a branch checked out in more than one worktree: Such a branch resolves to whichever worktree git lists first, so every worktree on it now carries ⚑ — worktree.state "duplicate_branch" in schema 1, a worktree.duplicate_branch boolean in schema 2. The flag makes the ambiguity visible in the listing; resolving such a branch from any command warns separately and names a duplicate to drop. (#3480, #3606)
• wt switch --execute computes only the template variables its command names: The switch path built every variable the template context could hold before rendering; it now resolves just the ones the command references. On a clone with no origin/HEAD and no cached default branch, that removes a git ls-remote the command never asked for — 13 subprocesses and one remote query down to 8 and none. (#3628) Fixed
• A branch checked out in a second worktree is retained on removal, -D included: wt remove and wt step prune now act on the worktree named rather than the branch's first checkout, and all three of wt remove, wt step prune, and wt merge keep the branch while another worktree still has it out — deleting the ref would leave that worktree unable to resolve HEAD, which is why git branch -d refuses the same delete. The retention is reported and names the surviving checkout rather than passing silently. (#3533)
• Removal reports what it took, not what it selected: A removal's summary and JSON described the plan, so a worktree candidate whose branch was retained still counted as ✓ Pruned 1 branch, and wt remove --format=json reported "branch_deleted": true beside a stderr line saying the branch was kept. Execution now returns the branch's fate; wt step prune counts executed outcomes (--dry-run included), both JSON payloads gained branch_deleted, and a declined orphan deletion drops out of the removed list rather than being reported as removed. (#3633, #3637)
• Hook previews expand every variable except vars.: One vars. token disabled expansion for the whole command, so wt hook show --expanded and wt hook --dry-run printed {{ branch }} and {{ repo }} raw in a listing whose job is to show the expansion. A preview now substitutes a stand-in that renders each vars. reference back as itself, nested access included, while every other variable expands — and no longer spawns the git read that resolving vars required. The listing is also derived from the execution path itself, so a context key added there reaches the preview with no second edit. wt config alias dry-run shares the renderer, so its help text — which still described the all-or-nothing behavior — was corrected to match. (#3635, #3638, #3639)
• wt hook show no longer prints a bare heading for an empty command list: A hook type declared as post-switch = [] has a config entry but no commands, and the section decided it had printed something from the entry rather than from the rows — so it emitted its heading and stopped, and the (none configured) line never appeared. Both the user and project sections carried the bug, since the loop and the fallback were duplicated; they now share one renderer that reports whether it wrote any rows. The execution path was already correct: an empty list announces nothing and is omitted from JSON. (#3641)
• wt config shell install reclaims its own legacy wrapper paths: Fish sources conf.d at startup, so a stale conf.d/{cmd}.fish was already loaded by the time fish would autoload the functions/{cmd}.fish the install had just written — the old definition won and the new wrapper never loaded. Install decided ownership by reading the file, and left anything unrecognized in place. Ownership now comes from the path: conf.d/{cmd}.fish and the stranded nushell {cmd}.nu candidates are paths worktrunk computes for the command being installed, so it takes them back whole, unread. Only that exact filename is touched — a neighbour under another name is not worktrunk's — and each removal is reported. wt config shell uninstall still reads the header, because it takes no --cmd and so cannot know the name; it prompts and previews every file first. (Breaking: install now removes a file at those exact paths regardless of its contents.) (#3602)
• Command timeouts actually bound wall-clock, and a default branch guessed while the remote was unreachable isn't cached: A timeout killed only the direct child, so a surviving grandchild held the output pipe open and the call ran on regardless — a 3 s bound measured at 120 s. A timed command now runs in its own process group and the whole tree is torn down on expiry, which fixes every existing bound including the fsmonitor and reap probes. On top of that, nothing in git bounds git ls-remote (an unreachable host costs ~127 s per address on Linux), so default-branch detection abandons the query after 10 s and falls back to local inference — without caching the result, so an outage can't make an inferred default branch permanent. (Breaking: because a timed command gets its own process group, Ctrl-C no longer reaches it; the command waits out the remaining bound.) (#3603)
• wt step relocate no longer strands a worktree in its staging directory: When worktree A's target was held by worktree B, and B was itself blocked by a non-worktree path without --clobber, the dependency loop read the stall as a cycle, temp-moved A into .git/wt/staging/relocate/, then failed moving it into the still-occupied target — leaving A at neither its original nor its expected path. A worktree blocked by an immovable occupant is now skipped. (#3530)
• Forge CLI failures are classified by response shape, not by the tool's prose: tea api copies the response body to stdout and exits 0, so an HTTP error never tripped the exit-code gate — a Gitea APIError body deserialized into {state: "", total_count: 0}, indistinguishable from a commit with no CI statuses, while the PR-list path blamed an API change for what was an API error. Failures from gh, glab, and tea are now keyed on the response envelope, and a non-zero exit keeps meaning the tool itself failed; the CLI's own error text is forwarded rather than reworded, so a bad token surfaces as gh: Bad credentials (HTTP 401) instead of a suggestion to re-authenticate. wt config show --full reports the Azure DevOps CLI extension alongside the other forge tools. (#3595, #3597, #3605)
• wt config plugins claude install-statusline no longer mistakes another tool's statusline for its own: The check for an existing worktrunk statusline matched the bare substring wt , which an unrelated command like newt status satisfies — so wt config show reported a foreign statusline as worktrunk's, and the installer early-returned "already configured" and refused to install. It now matches the adjacent list statusline token pair, so it works whether the binary is wt, git-wt, or an absolute path. (#3595)
• [list] task-timeout-ms is removed: The per-command bound is gone; [list] timeout-ms bounds the whole collect phase. A config that still sets it warns, and wt config update strips the key — in the top-level, project-scoped, and inline-table forms. (Breaking: the setting no longer has any effect. It was also, until this release, ignored for a command that carried its own bound.) (#3613, #3615) Documentation
• wt remove documents what retention protects: The branch-cleanup section's six conditions all ask whether deleting loses work; a branch checked out in a second worktree fails a different test, and the page now says so, alongside a new "Naming a worktree" section on wt switch. The FAQ's advice to git worktree lock a worktree holding precious ignored data now says what the lock actually buys — it blocks removal, and nothing else; wt merge and wt step push will still overwrite an ignored file the incoming commits track. (#3533, #3601, #3607)
• Default-branch detection documents the remote-query bound: The detection ladder records that the git ls-remote step is abandoned after 10 s, that local inference covers the abandoned case, and that this is the one result not cached. (#3603)
• wt step push records that destination-worktree safety matches git: Pushing overwrites an ignored file in the destination whose path the incoming commits track, exactly as a git merge run there would; the spec now says the match is deliberate. (#3614) Internal