Sorry for the delay in looking at this.

I'm not experienced with either bare repos or worktrees (even in non-bare repos), so maybe these are stupid questions, but I don't understand why you can't simply cd into your worktree and run lazygit there. In my brief testing, this worked fine with a worktree that is attached to a bare repo. But I also don't understand what /project/.git is in your picture above, so maybe your setup is somehow different from what I thought is the usual one. Can you explain?

Sorry for the delay in looking at this.

No problem at all. I've been real busy also 😉

Can you explain?

Yes, of course!

There is a worktree structure that is considered best practice, and most common. This pattern is recommended because it:

• Keeps all worktrees organized under a single project directory
• Maintains a single source of truth for all branches and history
• Allows for executing git commands from project/ directory.

You structure your project like this:

project/
 ├── .bare/          # The bare repository
 ├── feat-example/   # Worktree for feat-example branch
 ├── hotfix/         # Worktree for quick hotfixes
 ├── main/           # Worktree for main branch
 └── .git            # Optional: Git file with `gitdir: .bare` that makes regular git commands work from project root

This allows you to get a great overview of your worktrees, while keeping your version history at one place. You are essentially creating a pool of worktrees that you can move in and out of.

Current behavior (crashes):

cd /project
lazygit
# Error: fatal: this operation must be run in a work tree

Expected behavior (with this PR):

cd /project
lazygit
# Automatically detects bare repo setup and opens in main worktree

Why not just "cd into the worktree"?

You're absolutely right that users can cd into the worktree and run lazygit there. However:

1. Project-level operations: My git information is housed within the .bare/ directory, which resides in the root of the project/ directory. As a user I would expect to be able to open lazygit from the project/ root.
2. Awkward workflow: I find it very awkward to cd into one worktree to do things like:
   • Removing another worktree
   • Viewing the overall worktree status
   • Managing branches across all worktrees
   • These are project-level operations, not worktree-specific ones
3. Workflow consistency: Other Git tools (like git itself) work from the project root when there's a .git file pointing to the bare repo. For example, git worktree list works from /project/.

I hope that clarifies why I created this PR. 🙏🏼

Thanks for the explanation, makes a lot of sense. The setup sounds very useful, and I'm probably going to switch to that setup for my work repos.

However, I'm not convinced yet that being able to open lazygit from project/ is a good idea. This would make it seem like you can open the bare repo itself with lazygit, and work with it like you can with git CLI. This could be confusing; for example, if you cd into project/ and launch lazygit in order to create a new worktree, you might think that you should use a path like my-new-wt to create it under project/. However, you need to use ../my-new-wt, and that's very non-obvious I think. Having to explicitly cd into one of your worktrees and launch lazygit there makes this much clearer for me.

I feel that we shouldn't weaken the requirement that lazygit needs a worktree in order to work. Only work trees show up in the recent repos list; the project/ directory doesn't.

I'm still new to this workflow, so maybe I'm missing things here. Will play with this some more to get a better feeling for it.