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Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

gitbox.pierlis.com

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Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#11

Post by obeattie »

I'm still divided how I feel about these things. On the one hand, I actually find them very useful for staging and unstaging changes and visualizing branch/merge history, but on the other I worry for the people whose only interaction with git is via one of these GUI wrappers. To my mind, they keep you "too far away" from the gears of the version control system, and in this case a distributed version control system — a very important point to remember, as people who only use this and never a command line wouldn't have a hope in hell of using the distributed part of git — rebase a branch? merge in several heads? I'd like to see them try.

As for this particular one, though, I can't see it offers any advantage over GitX, apart from the "it's not a RubyCocoa app", which isn't really that great an advantage to my mind…

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#12

Post by jarin »

If you're a developer: Git is faster to work with and more powerful to use from the command line if you take maybe 20 minutes to go through a good tutorial. It took you much longer to learn how to program, and it's worth taking the time to get good at it.

If you're a designer, writer, etc: Even though it only takes 20 minutes to learn, if a GUI is what it takes to get you to use version control I guess that is the lesser of two evils :)

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#13

Post by bruceboughton »

piramida wrote: post #10
thethimble wrote: post #4

It seems to me that a lot of popular Unix-originated software seems to have really high learning curves (Vim comes to mind). I wish projects like git spent more efforts on things like GUIs. Does anybody know of any Linux alternatives?

Then again, git is not a consumer software. Developer should spend some time and learn 5 commands to be productive. But I find this interface interesting, even knowing all command line git this makes browsing history for reviews easy, nice tool.

The command line is very efficient for input of commands, far more so than GUIs (though keyboard shortcuts mitigate this). GUIs are far more efficient for output of infomation though, especially verbose info like history, log files, etc. It surprises me that die-hard CLIers often fail to recognise this.

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#14

Post by hboon »

jarin wrote: post #12

If you're a developer: Git is faster to work with and more powerful to use from the command line if you take maybe 20 minutes to go through a good tutorial. It took you much longer to learn how to program, and it's worth taking the time to get good at it. If you're a designer, writer, etc: Even though it only takes 20 minutes to learn, if a GUI is what it takes to get you to use version control I guess that is the le…

And an excellent read to learn about Git is http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.htm..., from a GitHub cofounder.

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#15

Post by aantix »

jarin wrote: post #12

If you're a developer: Git is faster to work with and more powerful to use from the command line if you take maybe 20 minutes to go through a good tutorial. It took you much longer to learn how to program, and it's worth taking the time to get good at it. If you're a designer, writer, etc: Even though it only takes 20 minutes to learn, if a GUI is what it takes to get you to use version control I guess that is the le…

I love the cheat gem.

sudo gem install cheat

Then do :

cheat git

A great shortcut to all of the common git command sequences.

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#16

Post by steilpass »

micampe wrote: post #8
kljensen wrote: post #2

God I wish I understood GIT. The screenshot here doesn't help me in any way. Tempted to stick with gitx. What is the advantage of this software?

at first glance, I prefer GitX, as it allows faster and more fine-grained staging and commit. the only feature this seems to have over GitX is push/pull. my typical usage is GitX for commits and history browsing and the shell for everything else.

+1 And I highly encourage everyone to get familiar with the command line first.

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#17

Post by jerome_etienne »

"Say, you move a file from one folder to another: in the Terminal you would have to “git rm” the old path (the file is gone, so no tab-completion) and “git add” the new path" -- from the homapage. well "git mv" is doing that just fine...

It doesnt appear to serious on the homepage of a git product :)

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-mv.html

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#18

Post by jerome_etienne »

harpastum wrote: post #5

I think it's very possible that these pretty wrappers allow people to hobble along with little to no understanding of how git actually works. If that's the only way that you'll use version control, it's better than nothing. On the other hand, I heartily endorse actually learning how the git model works -- it's not too bad, I promise! . Good places to start: [1] Peepcode's "Git Internals" PDF - $9 - short, sweet, to t…

just an addon, #git channel on irc.freenode.net are skilled and very helpfull.

Re: Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings

#19

Post by dagw »

p3ll0n wrote: post #7
harpastum wrote: post #5

I think it's very possible that these pretty wrappers allow people to hobble along with little to no understanding of how git actually works. If that's the only way that you'll use version control, it's better than nothing. On the other hand, I heartily endorse actually learning how the git model works -- it's not too bad, I promise! . Good places to start: [1] Peepcode's "Git Internals" PDF - $9 - short, sweet, to t…

If you want to learn git, open a terminal and read the man pages, create a dummy repository, push changes to it, pull from it, clone it, merge it, etc. Don't start with something like Gitbox because its hides all the details and more importantly the beauty and elegance of git.

I can see this being useful where you have lots of developers, most of whom simply need to get stuff done and don't particularly care about the beauty of git. You have your local git expert who can do the hard stuff and fix all the problems, and everybody else uses gitbox.
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