Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

emacsair.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 357 posts

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#81

Post by AJRF »

bsdubernerd wrote: post #56

For the sake of discussion, can we get some contrarian views? I'm using magit, along with tig, plain git and sometimes (!) even plain "vc", depending on context. I'm in the camp that thinks it's ok and it's pretty comfortable to use within emacs, but I don't see the earth shattering praise I see every time it's mentioned here. Tig for example is so much faster for history and blame perusal that I find it faster to ke…

I get the same impression using org mode vs hearing people talk about it. It's great! but the way it's talked about makes you think it will change your life and finally stop you being a lazy procrastinating fool.

It's very cool and flexible and doesn't tie you in to any big tech provider (yay!), but it's just an outliner at the end of the day.

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#82

Post by laserlight »

rich_sasha wrote: post #67
bsdubernerd wrote: post #56

For the sake of discussion, can we get some contrarian views? I'm using magit, along with tig, plain git and sometimes (!) even plain "vc", depending on context. I'm in the camp that thinks it's ok and it's pretty comfortable to use within emacs, but I don't see the earth shattering praise I see every time it's mentioned here. Tig for example is so much faster for history and blame perusal that I find it faster to ke…

I use emacs and git, and never got on with magit. Not entirely sure why, but here's a braindump: - I generally dislike layers on layers; while I seriously hate the git UI, I'd rather learn that, as it's a more portable skill, than learn another UI, that relies on emacs and a package installed. First thing I do on e.g. a new cloud instance is clone a bunch of stuff, and often work on an under-setup machine for a while…

> I generally dislike layers on layers; while I seriously hate the git UI, I'd rather learn that

I'm surprised to hear this. Magit is a very thin layer on top of git. Not thin in the technical sense, but in UI/UX sense. Keybindings map almost one to one with git CLI. Arguments to the git CLI are explicitly stated. Executed git command is reported. I learned git better by using Magit.

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#83

Post by rusk »

viccuad wrote: post #33
aldanor wrote: post #11

Given I've been on/off Spacemacs / Doom for years myself, I would definitely pay for a well-packaged isolated one-click-installable Magit as a separate git client.

is this enough? alias magit='emacsclient -t -c -e "(progn (magit-status) (delete-other-windows))"'

could you use magit without knowing emacs? I guess you could ... but I can imagine people getting frustrated when the windows keybindings they're used to don't bring forth the expected behaviour. CUA mode exists. Would that be enough?

Is magit good enough to actually force people to learn that little bit of Emacs?

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#84

Post by gpderetta »

jolmg wrote: post #64
grumpyprole wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magit is unfortunately so slow on Windows that it's unusable. This is a real shame, because the UI is fantastic. I think a better architecture would use libgit2 calls rather than launching multiple git processes for every single magit operation.

Is the launching of processes on Windows so much slower than on Unix-type OSes that it would cause it to be "so slow" for that reason? Maybe the reason is another? Personally, I once had Magit act real slow at times because git-annex had added some git hook for something that I didn't need. Just removing that hook improved performance massively. Perhaps something similar is happening. Also, I'm not sure Emacs Lisp ca…

> Also, I'm not sure Emacs Lisp can interface directly with C libraries, so using libgit2 might not be an option.

I believe these days (i.e. since emacs 25) it can via dynamic modules. There are ffi libraries built on top of it.

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#85

Post by nivenkos »

drekipus wrote: post #75

Seeing a co-worker use magic inspired me to try out fugitive on the vim side and I'm actually blown away. So it's excellent in more ways than one. Also inspired me to try out Emacs but that's a longer story

Fugitive is amazing. I was once pair programming with someone, noticed a weird line in the code, used the in-line git blame, then open that whole commit, and could analyse all the changes right there in neovim.

Compared to opening up Github, or stashing and checking out via git manually, it was so much faster.

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#86

Post by brabel »

dhess wrote: post #68
jolmg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the launching of processes on Windows so much slower than on Unix-type OSes that it would cause it to be "so slow" for that reason? Maybe the reason is another? Personally, I once had Magit act real slow at times because git-annex had added some git hook for something that I didn't need. Just removing that hook improved performance massively. Perhaps something similar is happening. Also, I'm not sure Emacs Lisp ca…

Unfortunately, it's pretty slow on macOS, as well. I love Magit, but there are times when I feel like it's hindering me more than helping due to the performance.

I use it on a low spec MacBook Air, and it works just fine for me... never noticed any kind of slowness.

I only work on Emacs in small projects though... so maybe that's why it's fast for me?!

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#87

Post by pronoiac »

masklinn wrote: post #47
yewenjie wrote: post #14

Magit is insanely ergonomic. Like how easy is it to selectively stage portions of files in the git CLI? In magit it is usually just a few keystrokes. I wish magit-forge [0] had more features though - like I cannot create new labels from it. Please consider donating [1] to the developer if it has made your life any easier. [0] https://github.com/magit/forge [1] https://magit.vc/donate/

> Like how easy is it to selectively stage portions of files in the git CLI? It’s not hard (`git add -p`) unless you need line-wise selection. The main issue in my experience is that it’s completely linear so you need perfect memory and to never make any mistakes: git shows each hunk individually and tells you to make your choice before it shows the next, no take-backs. Magit shows the entire diff and lets you jump a…

I think 'git reset -p' lets you unstage a selection, and I'd use '/' in both searching for the chunk to unstage and to continue where I left off.

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#89

Post by b0afc375b5 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #58
jwr wrote: post #43

Magit is such an unbelievably good piece of software. If you haven't used it, please at least take a look. It seems like "just a GUI for git", but that's missing the point — many operations suddenly become frictionless, so your entire workflow changes. I regularly do things like "stash some of my changes, switch branch, cherry pick a commit, switch branch, do an interactive rebase reordering commits and dropping one,…

Can I like magit if I don’t like emacs?

Absolutely. I can honestly say I learned Magit first (since it was directly applicable to my job) before I "properly" learned emacs.

Re: Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

#90

Post by seastonATccs »

brabel wrote: post #69
bsdubernerd wrote: post #56

For the sake of discussion, can we get some contrarian views? I'm using magit, along with tig, plain git and sometimes (!) even plain "vc", depending on context. I'm in the camp that thinks it's ok and it's pretty comfortable to use within emacs, but I don't see the earth shattering praise I see every time it's mentioned here. Tig for example is so much faster for history and blame perusal that I find it faster to ke…

Ok, let me try. I prefer IntelliJ's git interface. Magit can do everything IJ can, but in IJ, I can find how to do things more easily and it just feels easier to do things, probably because it's much more GUI than text compared to Magit. For example, difficult merges are extremely easy in IntelliJ, I can edit code in the diff view itself while I resolve conflicts... in Magit it requires getting used to the different…

IntelliJ GIT ui/ux is so completely frictionless it's magical at times. The only downside is that it makes incredibly complex operations trivial that I never learned git from the cli beyond the very basics.
Post reply on HN