desktop VS git-branchless

Congrats on the launch! It's always exciting to see more competition in the version control space.

One question I have is whether you guys are better than:

https://desktop.github.com/

This seems to do the exact same thing, be free forever, and have a more mature GUI that is also easier to use than regular terminal git. In my firm, even with people who don't know how to code, they can use github desktop (since it babies you through the process of committing code.)

- Product designers for open-source hardware. Various design files, SVG etc.

I’ve experimented with a “GUI only” git flow - just to see what is possible, so I could introduce the concept to others.

I found GitHub desktop app (https://desktop.github.com/)did a great job of visually showing git flows and functions, but for a non-tech/programmming person, the tool would be daunting.

Curiosity what your suggested tech stack would be - sans Terminal…

just use github desktop its an open source tool https://desktop.github.com/

GitHub Desktop - much, much easier than installing and setting up Git yourself (free)

GitHub Desktop - Price: Free Git client for Mac that allows you to manage your GitHub repositories.

https://desktop.github.com/ should help a lot

At the beginning of the year I was rewriting a SPA and looking for ideas on how to structure a web app. One project I looked at was Github Desktop and I think it has very clean code for an app.

https://github.com/desktop/desktop

Download and install the GitHub Desktop application.

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.

Rebasing is a fundamental primitive, but not Git's implementation of interactive rebasing.

I very much subscribe to a patch stack workflow, but have a great deal of difficulty doing advanced things in Git, because `git rebase -i` does not support enough workflows.

Here's some features which I've implemented which improved on `git rebase`.in general: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-...

On the contrary: I myself have implemented these better operations, and they work great. They also exist in some other VCSes. You can see the `git-branchless` column in the table for comparison with the other clients.

- git reword: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-...

- git move will perform the magic "see all downstream conflicts", but unfortunately will only show you the number of conflicting files, at present: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-...

- You cannot undo arbitrary operations with the reflog (nor with `git reset`). See https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Architecture#.... Besides those points, my `git undo` can even undo some working copy changes: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-...

> The author's "features from the future" feel to me like they just haven't gotten a good feel for the model.

The author is apparently behind[1] a sucessful alternative UI to Git. It seems safe to assume that they are way beyond merely getting a feel for the Git model.

The Bad-UX denialism has really gone too far when authors like that are dismissed over the old You Just Have To Understand The Model talking point.

[1] https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/

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.