awesome-structure-editors VS git-branchless

Yes, I think that we can do better than plain text as the source of truth, and thus git would probably need to change.

There's work around a bunch of languages that are not based on text, some have their own editor or a tool to manage a canonical representation in text for you that would make them friendlier to git.

  - https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/main/README.md

There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff.

Haskell seems to be pretty big. For example in this list of projects it appears to be the second most popular language (after TypeScript) :)

See https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

You could submit a pull request to get it added to awesome-structure-editors by /u/yairchu

It would be interesting to have such a general project go somewhere.

While in principle structural editing sounds like an incredible advance, there are 'good enough' advantages to plain-text tools that make it a much more practical solution. The other issue is of course integration with existing tooling, which you either skip entirely or compromise on the design.

What I feel is missing, between the description of "old, bad state of things" and "utopian vision" is a review of some of the projects that already tried to achieve this ideal state. It turns out there are a number of them, and most of them failed to achieve any traction or impact [0].

The rants are very long, so I skimmed quickly the one about git; I understand the complaints, although git is only bringing me joy and no pain --interactive rebase, absorb and a few aliases made it a breeze. But in a similar fashion there are projects trying to solve its fundamental issues, like pijul(.org); what are they missing?

[0] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

Some good ones pops up in Projectional Programming [1] once in a while. The pinned thread links to the structure-editors github list [2] too.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax/

[2] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

Yes, but due to its simplicity + extensibility + widespread adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re still using Git 100+ years from now.

The current trend (most popular and IMO likely to succeed) is to make tools (“layers”) which work on top of Git, like more intuitive UI/patterns (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit, https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless) and smart merge resolvers (https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge, https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/how-to-configure/s...). Git it so flexible, even things that it handles terribly by default, it handles

> Is this for a case where a bunch of people branch from master@HEAD (lets call this A), then you need to modify A, so you then need to rebase each branch that branched from A individually?

Mainly it's for when you branch from A multiple times, and then modify A. This can happen if you have some base work that you build multiple features on top of. I routinely do this as part of rapid prototyping, as described here: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Workflow:-div...

`git undo` shows a list of operations it'll execute, which you have to confirm before accepting. Of course, it's ultimately a matter of trust in the tools you use.

What happens is you work somewhere that has stacked diffs and suddenly you learn how to shape your diffs to make them easy to review. Thinking of how folks will review your code in chunks while writing it makes it cleaner. Having small but easy to read diffs makes reviews faster and helps junior devs learn how to review.

Sometimes this doesn’t happen in which case you end up need to split your commit at the end. This is where git utterly fails. You end up needing git split and git absorb to make this productive.

Git split let’s you select which chunks in a commit should belong to it and then splits that into a commit and then you do it again and again until you have lots of commits. You’ll still need to probably test each one but the majority of the work is done

Git absorb takes changes on the top of your stack and magically finds which commit in your stack the each chunk should belong to and amends it to the right commit

You also need git branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless as it lets you move up and down the stack without needing to remember so much git arcana.