gh-dash

The short answer

If you already live in a terminal, use gh-dash. It is free, MIT-licensed, actively developed, and at 12,519 stars (measured 2026-09-16 on its repository) it is by a wide margin the most used dashboard in this category. PR Marmot is newer and smaller — 0 stars on the same day, which is the honest number.

The real question is not which is better. It is whether you want a pull request dashboard inside your terminal or beside it. gh-dash is the first; PR Marmot is the second. PR Marmot also ships prmarmot-cli, which prints the window’s views into a terminal for scripts and coding agents, but it is not a terminal UI: it has no keyboard navigation, no panes, and no actions.

What gh-dash is

gh-dash calls itself “a rich terminal UI for GitHub that doesn't break your flow.” It is a GitHub CLI extension written in Go, MIT-licensed, and configured in YAML. Described from gh-dash.dev and its repository, read 2026-09-16.

• Your own sections. prSections and issuesSections take GitHub search filters, so the dashboard's layout is whatever set of queries you decide matters.
• Your own commands. Custom commands can be bound to keys and run against the selected row, which makes it a launcher as well as a view.
• Terminal navigation. h/j/k/l to move between rows and sections, o to open in a browser, y/Y to copy a pull request number or URL.
• Themes. Colours and display options are configurable.
• It runs where your terminal runs, which includes over SSH, on a build box, or inside a container with no desktop at all.

Where gh-dash wins

This is the section that matters, because anyone reading this page probably already knows gh-dash is good.

• It is far more established. 12,519 stars against 0 means years of issues, answers, dotfiles and blog posts that PR Marmot simply does not have yet.
• It is the terminal UI. For working through pull requests interactively inside a terminal, gh-dash stays the pick. PR Marmot’s prmarmot-cli only prints views.
• It is already open. No extra window to manage, no app to switch to — it is a command in the terminal you were using anyway.
• It is configurable in ways PR Marmot is not. If you want a section for “PRs touching the payments directory, older than a week, not mine”, gh-dash will give you exactly that. PR Marmot's sections are built in.
• It works on Linux and Windows today, with no build step. PR Marmot ships a signed binary for Apple-silicon Macs only; everywhere else means building from source.
• It can do things. Custom commands let you check out a branch or run your own script against the selected pull request. PR Marmot is read-only toward GitHub by design.
• It is free and MIT, exactly like PR Marmot. Neither of us is the paid option here.

What PR Marmot adds

Everything below is a trade against the list above, not a refutation of it.

• A GUI, for people who do not want a TUI. A resizable native window with a table you can leave on a second screen, rather than a pane competing with your shell.
• No configuration file. The sections — work involving you, your own pull requests, reviews requested from you, work available to review — are built in. There is no YAML to write before it is useful, and no YAML to maintain when GitHub's search syntax moves.
• A computed Note per pull request. Instead of showing you CI, reviews, comments and conflicts as separate columns to interpret, PR Marmot reads them together and writes a sentence about what the row needs next.
• Watch, snooze, and Changed. Watch a pull request with w, snooze one with s until a condition you choose, and see Changed markers for what moved since the app last looked.
• Stack grouping from GitHub's native stack metadata, ordered base first, with partial stacks marked as partial.
• Desktop notifications for watched pull requests while the app is running.
• The same split for scripts and agents. prmarmot-cli prints the window’s My PRs and Review queue views as a table, Markdown or JSON, and prmarmot-cli watch prints one event per line, so a shell prompt, a script or a coding agent works from the same sections. The reference covers its formats and install paths.

Both read GitHub with your own token and store nothing of their own. gh-dash authenticates through the gh CLI; PR Marmot signs in by itself, with a one-time code or a token, and picks up the gh login when there is one.

Side by side

No memory or CPU comparison appears here. PR Marmot’s own soak results are published in the app repository: a 37.4-hour run of v0.9.1 met the memory gate the project set itself, after one of its thresholds was rewritten in the open, and the write-up gives both. gh-dash has not been measured the same way, so a comparison would be an assertion rather than a measurement.

Which one to use

Choose gh-dash if your editor is in a terminal, you enjoy configuring tools, you work over SSH, you are on Linux or Windows, or you want to trigger actions from the dashboard.

Try PR Marmot if you use a graphical editor, you want a window you can glance at without changing context, you would rather not write YAML, or you want the Note and the watch/snooze workflow. If your scripts or coding agents need the same My PRs and Review queue split, prmarmot-cli prints it.

They coexist fine. Both are free and MIT, so the only cost of trying the other one is a few minutes. Install PR Marmot or read the wider roundup of Mac options.

Sources

• gh-dash.dev — the project's own documentation. Read 2026-09-16.
• dlvhdr/gh-dash — repository, licence and star count. Measured 2026-09-16: 12,519 stars, MIT.
• “Gh-dash: A beautiful CLI dashboard for GitHub” — Hacker News discussion.
• oliver-kriska/prmarmot — PR Marmot's own repository. Measured 2026-09-16: 0 stars, MIT.