Glossary
Canonical one-line definitions. Each term links to the page that explains it fully — when other pages use these words, they mean exactly this.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Goal | A collection of related prompts that add up to one objective ("Add user authentication"). Goals are the nodes on the Map. |
| Prompt | The instruction you give your coding agent inside a goal ("Implement the login form"). Prompts group steps. |
| Step | One committed checkpoint of your project: a snapshot of the files plus what changed and why. The CLI and the agent skill call this a subprompt — same object, different surface. See How Merget works. |
| Patch | One individual edit inside a step. Each patch carries its own transcript. |
| Transcript | The committed record behind a change: your prompt, the agent's actions, and any hand edits made during the session. Attached to patches, viewable per step. See Navigating history. |
| Bookmark | A named pointer to a step ("demo-friday", "last-good"). The ones you create are passive - they stay put until you move them. Two are built in: latest (auto-follows the newest prompt) and main/trunk (your manual production marker). See Bookmarks. |
| HEAD | Your current position in history — what your working files reflect. Has four states; see below and The history model. |
| Active (HEAD state) | You're on a prompt's tip; new work extends it. |
| Initial (HEAD state) | You're on a brand-new prompt with no steps yet; the next step is its first. |
| Detached (HEAD state) | You're standing on a specific step (e.g. after checking out a bookmark or an old step); new work here starts a fork. |
| Empty (HEAD state) | No active goal yet — a fresh repo before any work is committed. |
| Fork node | A small marker on a map edge where work diverged into separate lines or merged back. See The Map. |
| Merge mode | The map mode for combining two goals' work into one. See Merging goals. |
| The committing daemon | The background process that watches your agent sessions and file changes and turns them into steps. You don't run it yourself — the app manages it. See How Merget works. |
| Registered repo | A repo your account knows about on Merget's servers. Registered repos sync by default. See Sync & privacy. |
| Remote | A server copy of your repo that sync pushes to and pulls from. See Collaborators & sharing. |
| Namespace | The owner part of a repo's address — your username or an organization. See Organizations. |
| Organization | A shared namespace with members and roles (Owner / Admin / Member / Read). See Organizations. |
| Working tree | The actual files in your project folder right now — what you edit and what checkout rewrites. |
| Agent plugin | The hook package Merget installs into a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) so its sessions are committed. See Your agent and Merget. |
| The merget skill | The instructions Merget ships to your agent so it can operate Merget — commit, check out, merge — on your behalf. See Your agent and Merget. |
Next: Index · Related: How Merget works · The history model