On 05/09/14 09:51, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Hmm, checking out the demo server, that side-by-side diff still doesn't
really compare to the non-HTML ones I've used. On the real ones, the
horizontal scrollbar is never hidden below the bottom of the window, all
the way down at the bottom of the diffed files, like this one is. And
the horizontal sizes and positions are normally kept pretty much in
sync, unlike these HTML versions.
See this:
http://meldmerge.org/images/meld-filediff-full.png
That's how it should work, and how every real GUI diff tool I've used
works. And it's done that way for good reason. The horizontal scroll bar
is always right there. And scrolling it will scroll both together,
instead of awkwardly scrolling one unified viewport within a larger
"document" (which isn't nearly as practical).
Right, I didn't think of that. I looked at a small diff.
By comparison, the GitHub and Gitlab side-by-side diffs both fall
squarely into "cute little trick" territory rather than
"professional-grade software". Granted, GitHub and Gitlab pretty much
have their hands tied on the matter: It would likely be rather
difficult, if realistically possible, to make it work right given their
constraints. But that's the price they pay for clinging to HTML as their
one and only UI.
Yeah, having a web UI doesn't make it easier.
No, I've tried those. Disappointingly, they're not *at all* what they
sound like.
You've seen that "Clone via GitHub for Windows" button in every GitHub
repo? *That* is pretty much what the whole thing is all about.
JavaScript doesn't give them a way to invoke "git clone ..." on the
client's computer, so they made a "program" to let them do it and
claimed it was "GitHub on the desktop" (which really isn't true at all).
And from what I can tell, it was never even *intended* to be any sort of
alternative to the web interface, despite what it sounds like.
They're really nothing more than ordinary Git clients, like TortoiseGit
or even "Git GUI", except straitjacketed and not particularly useful.
Pretty much anything that GitHub's web interface provides, is still
*expected* to be done via the web interface. "GitHub for Win/Mac"
doesn't even attempt to provide access to most (any?) of those features.
Again, it's mainly just intended to be a way for "dummies" to clone a
GitHub repo. It's a glorified GUI wrapper for "git clone
[protocol]:github.com/[repo]" and a few other trivial things.
I never used the Github application and I never intend to. The only
useful Git related application I use is Gitx. It's similar to gitg or
gitk and I use it only for looking a the history. Oh, and the Git
integration in TextMate is pretty nice.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
