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Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

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41–50 of 73 posts

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#41
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed. i dont know why one would pay 40 bucks for an app that already exists for free.

Gitbox is superior to what you have today. Very common things like commiting and checking the status and log are much faster and cleaner than in the command line or GitX. It is easier to extract a file from history, compare and manage the branches. You also pay for a level of attention to details in Gitbox, I explain it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944698

>Very common things like commiting and checking the status and log are much faster and cleaner than in the command line...

git st, git add ., git ci seem pretty quick to me. I set aliases for status to st and commit to ci, but tab completion work pretty well. I've been stepping away from GUIs lately when the command line is available. It's quicker for my hands to stay on the keyboard than it is to switch to the mouse and back

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#42
It's a good effort - although I agree with a lot of the folks commenting here, I cannot recommend this to anyone without Git experience over GitX. The good news is, there is plenty of room for an intuitive GUI based Git app, particularly with GitHub integration. It's frustrating working with non-developer types who need access to static assets that need to be versioned. I need to get them an SVN equivalent such as Cornerstone or Versions. Teaching them the command line and Git is an all too time consuming process and I have no choice but to ensure they know at least the basics on smaller projects where non-developers are tightly coupled with things like HTML/images, etc.

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which fork of GitX would you recommend? Maintaining a tool like this is basically unpleasant. You either need to be maintaining it for internal customers in a large company, or you need to sell it as a product - in other words, it's one of those products you really want to get paid for. Maybe having a paid project will help keep this app actively developed.

Brotherbard's fork has a bunch of additional features and I've found it to be pretty stable. I use it daily and highly recommend it. https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx

Another good tool that works on all platforms is smartgit: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/index.html

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in OS X users are less tolerant of badly designed GUIs?

That might be a factor, but no, mainly as in "tk interfaces look and behave dreadfully on OSX, as do pretty much all X applications but even more so, when they accept to work at all". * Even from on a hot start, gitk takes almost 5s between invocation and startup (on a 2.4GHz MBP) where GitX takes roughly 2s on a cold start (cold-start gitk takes on the order of 10s). * X applications don't behave in OSX: Divvy's res…

Ah yes, I keep saying "GUI" when I suppose I actually mean "look & feel".

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#45
post #31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git-osx-installer package takes 4.3MB, but your git.bundle takes 150MB. The problem is that the bundle contains exactly same binary 104 times (git, git-add, git-apply, etc. are identical files, 1.3MB each). These should be symlinks. It might be ZIP's fault (doesn't support symlinks AFAIK). I distribute my apps as tar.bz2, and nobody complained yet.

ZIP on OS X supports symlinks.

I couldn't get it store hardlinks properly (using ditto). Do you know how to fix that?

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitbox is superior to what you have today. Very common things like commiting and checking the status and log are much faster and cleaner than in the command line or GitX. It is easier to extract a file from history, compare and manage the branches. You also pay for a level of attention to details in Gitbox, I explain it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944698

>Very common things like commiting and checking the status and log are much faster and cleaner than in the command line... git st, git add ., git ci seem pretty quick to me. I set aliases for status to st and commit to ci, but tab completion work pretty well. I've been stepping away from GUIs lately when the command line is available. It's quicker for my hands to stay on the keyboard than it is to switch to the mouse…

> It's quicker for my hands to stay on the keyboard than it is to switch to the mouse and back

Agreed. Why would anyone want to stop working, grab the mouse and click on a menu, when the command-line interface for git works perfectly.

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#48

Can anyone compare this to SourceTree? http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ which appears to support git and mercurial as a native MacOSX app and only 8MB download. Both appear to be too early of a release for me to shell out $40 for.

I was going to post about sourcetree. I downloaded the trial, it's pretty good. It's written by the author of ogre3d. You should check it out.

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#49
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed. i dont know why one would pay 40 bucks for an app that already exists for free.

Gitbox is superior to what you have today. Very common things like commiting and checking the status and log are much faster and cleaner than in the command line or GitX. It is easier to extract a file from history, compare and manage the branches. You also pay for a level of attention to details in Gitbox, I explain it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944698

One thing I notice is that gitbox seems to have a persistent notion of which repositories it cares about. This will not work well with how I (and presumably many other folks) use git/hg/et al.

Namely, for every little project with writing (latex) or programming (in some language), I create a repo. Over the course of a given year, this means easily 50+ repos, some short lived, some that I use for quite a while. I do not want to be dealing with a sidepane of my repos unless i can toggle it to show just eg "my 10 most recent repos" or the like, which I don't think gitbox seems to presently offer that.

Also, I approve of the choice of having a 1 repo limit thing as the distinguisher between with and sans license.

another question is: how do you plan to distinguish yourself from smartgit, which is the current / only gui'd paid osx git app?

Re: Gitbox 1.0 released: a version control app for Mac

#50
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZIP on OS X supports symlinks.

I couldn't get it store hardlinks properly (using ditto). Do you know how to fix that?

is there a reason you can't write a script to make the links rather than zipping it up?
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