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Sign up for a first look at GitHub Desktop

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Re: Sign up for a first look at GitHub Desktop

#21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an obvious choice. Linux users are going to be cli friendly - an area Git happens to excel at already.

Yes, I've never found a Git client that doesn't result in a second-class experience. For anything common, a CLI is almost always quicker and more consistent. For everything else, I'd much rather quickly search a man page or Stack Overflow for a command than search through likely verbose help documentation for a GUI app.

Visual diff is very useful to me. I use Meld which works really well for now. But I would love to see a terminal based side-by-side diff view. Does tig have that?

Re: Sign up for a first look at GitHub Desktop

#25
post #13

I'm assuming they're getting rid of all that native code for Windows and Mac and building something new on top of Electron. If so, why there is no Linux distro?!

I'd love to know how many of their users are on Linux, especially when broken down by activity levels.

Re: Sign up for a first look at GitHub Desktop

#27
post #20
post #12

Just signed up. My git functionality is at a level of "can do all of the basic jank easily but need to Google everything else", which I'm super comfortable with, in all honesty. The only thing I really want out of a GUI is a visual diff/comparison tool before pushes. Does anyone have any recommendations for something along these lines?

Source Tree ( https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ ) is great. Good visual layout of your diffs at any given point with the ability to stage/discard/unstage specific lines from within the program.

In my experience Source Tree is good but it happens to have noticeable slowdown and "jank" on both OS X and Windows after a while.

On OS X I've been using Tower to great effect. Unfortunately it's OS X only.

Re: Sign up for a first look at GitHub Desktop

#28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an obvious choice. Linux users are going to be cli friendly - an area Git happens to excel at already.

Yes, I've never found a Git client that doesn't result in a second-class experience. For anything common, a CLI is almost always quicker and more consistent. For everything else, I'd much rather quickly search a man page or Stack Overflow for a command than search through likely verbose help documentation for a GUI app.

> For anything common, a CLI is almost always quicker and more consistent.

I'm also a command line fan, but when it comes to git there are 2 areas where a GUI is nice:

- After slashing through dozens of files, it's nice to have a nice GUI that gives you a list of all changed files, and manually select the lines you want to stage. I use git-cola (https://git-cola.github.io/) or git extensions (https://gitextensions.github.io/, although there's no screenshot of this exact functionality) depending on the platform I'm on

- When I need to explore a repo's history, I like having some interactivity: filtering branches/tags, quickly searching for a commit or its ancestor, search where a commit is included... the git cli is absolutely not the right tool for that.

I could get used to tig (https://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/git-tig/) because it fits the bill for both cases, I just haven taken the time. Sometimes a mouse may be the best tool.

Re: Sign up for a first look at GitHub Desktop

#29
post #12

Just signed up. My git functionality is at a level of "can do all of the basic jank easily but need to Google everything else", which I'm super comfortable with, in all honesty. The only thing I really want out of a GUI is a visual diff/comparison tool before pushes. Does anyone have any recommendations for something along these lines?

While you're waiting for access to the Desktop preview, check out the current GitHub for Mac (https://mac.github.com/) and GitHub for Windows (https://windows.github.com/). I use GHfM everyday in tandem with CLI, and the basic visual diffing is great.
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