Cloning

New repository → Clone, or ⌘K → Clone. Paste a URL, or sign in to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Azure DevOps and pick from your own repositories — the token for the chosen profile is used for the clone and then dropped, never written into .git/config.

Choose a parent folder and a name; the line under the fields shows exactly where the repository will land. A folder that already exists is refused rather than merged into.

Advanced — narrowing the clone

Everything under Advanced is off by default: leave it alone and you get an ordinary, complete clone. It earns its place on repositories where "complete" means twenty minutes and several gigabytes.

The clone dialog with Advanced open: partial, shallow, single-branch, submodules and a branch picker

Option	What git does	What it costs
Partial clone	`--filter=blob:none`	Full history, no file contents. Blobs arrive on demand, so opening an old file needs the network.
Shallow clone	`--depth=N`	Only the newest N commits exist. Blame, log, bisect and range-diff stop at the cut.
Only one branch	`--single-branch`	The other branches stay on the remote until you fetch them.
Clone submodules	`--recurse-submodules`	Every submodule is checked out too — more time now, no missing directories later.
Branch to check out	`--branch <name>`	Starts on that branch instead of the remote's default.

Partial before shallow. A partial clone keeps every commit — history stays searchable, and only file contents are fetched lazily. A shallow clone actually discards history: git log ends at the cut and blame cannot see past it. If you are cloning a monorepo to work in, partial is usually the one you want.

Shallow is undoable: git fetch --unshallow in the terminal fills the history back in.

Picking the branch

Type a branch name, or press List branches to ask the remote what it has (git ls-remote --heads) and choose from a dropdown. That is one network round trip, made only when you press the button — nothing is queried while you type.

If the listing fails — a private URL with no token yet, a typo, no network — the field stays a plain text box and the clone itself reports the real error.

Two notes on the flags

--depth implies --single-branch. With a shallow clone, leaving Only one branch unchecked is what asks for the other branches back (--no-single-branch), which is why the hint under it changes.
Cloning a local folder normally ignores --depth entirely, because git hardlinks the object store instead of fetching. Gitcito clones through a file:// URL when you ask for a shallow copy of a local repository, so the depth you asked for is the depth you get.

Progress

The bar reports what git reports: counting, compressing, receiving, resolving, checking out. A stage that cannot report a total shows an indeterminate bar rather than a fake percentage.

The new repository opens in a tab, pinned to the profile you cloned with.