On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Sitaram Chamarty <sitar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:24 PM, David Aguilar <dav...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *cough* git-cola *cough*
>>
>> it runs everywhere.  Yes, windows too. It's written in python.
>> It's been actively maintained since 2007.
>>
>> It's "modern" and has features that don't exist anywhere else.
>>
>> It even has tests.  It even comes with a building full of willing
>> guinea-pigs^Wtesters that let me know right away when
>> anything goes wrong.
>>
>> It uses Qt but that's really the whole point of Qt -> cross-platform.
>> (not sure how that wiki page ended up saying Gnome/GTK?)
>>
>> The DAG aka git-dag (in its master branch, about to be released)
>> is nicer looking then gitk IMO.  gitk still has some features
>> that are better too--there's no silver bullet, but the delta
>> is pretty small.
>
> Gitk does a lot of things that people don't realise, since they're not
> really documented and you have to scrounge around on the UI.  The
> thing is, it's just about the most awesome tool for code archeology I
> have seen.
>
> I realise (from looking at the doc page) that git-cola helps you do
> all sorts of things, but those are all things I am happier doing at
> the command line.

Ditto.  There's actually a few small things I use it for,
mainly for teasing apart commits.  These days you can use git-gui
for that, but in the old days it was the only way to interactively
select individual lines and stage/unstage/revert them, etc.
I don't think we can line-by-line revert in git-gui yet, though.

Some other small things that I use: ctrl-g, type something
for grep, hit enter twice and I'm in my editor on that
(or any other selected) line.  'spacebar' does xdg-open,
and 'enter' launches the editor in the status widget;
small things.  I, too, do most stuff on the command line.

The grep thing is a good example.  You have tons of output,
you see the one line that you care about, and you want to jump
there.  Clicking on that line and hitting enter is the minimal
effort to do that.  You don't have to click because we also
have keyboard navigation.  I have a feeling that there's probably
something I'm missing, though.. another way of working (emacs?)
that would render all of this custom GUI stuff pointless.

What I learned about users:

The commit editor is the #1 thing that got my coworkers finally
writing better commit messages. It forces the subject/description
separation and shows yellow, red when the subject gets too long.
It also auto-wraps.  IMO it makes sense for git-gui to do
the same these days.

> Gitk does precisely those things which *require* a GUI, where the
> amount of information presented overwhelms a text interface.  The
> display is concisely designed to give you the maximum information at a
> minimum space use.  For example, a little black square when a commit
> has a note attached.  Even hovering over the arrow-heads, on complex
> trees where the line gets broken, does something meaningful.
>
> if I had to pin it down, the feature I use most often is "Show origin
> of this line".  Other features I use often are
>   - review a commit file by file (f and b keys, also spacebar and 'd')
>   - search by SHA1 (4 digits appear to be enough, regardless of how
> big your repo is),
>   - search for commits changing path/dir (while still showing all the
> commits; i.e., this is not 'git-dag -- README.txt' but within gitk you
> search up and down for commits touching README.txt
>   - and navigating the commit tree looking for stuff
>
> http://sitaramc.github.com/1-basic-usage/gitk.html is my attempt to
> document some of the stuff I have found and use.

Wow, this is awesome.

> One final point: the DAG on the right wastes enormous amounts of
> space.  Purely subjectively, it is almost jarring on the senses.  (If
> you reduce it, it becomes unreadable).
>
> With all due respect, git-cola/dag isn't anywhere near what gitk does,
> at least for people who are not afraid of the command line and only
> need the GUI to visualise a truly complex tree.

This is really great feedback.
cc:ing Guillaume since he had similar ideas.

thx,
-- 
David
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Reply via email to