Live data from Hacker News

Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

git-fork.com

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#31
post #15

Unrelated to fork itself, but I always wonder how do people implement the vertical colored lines representing branches and merges. This is present in almost all git desktop clients, and of course very useful.

There's also the least-promoted awesome project that is terminal/ncurses based... so easy to run on remote development

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonasfonseca/3315600409/in/alb... (the official site link screenshots to flikr :)

https://jonas.github.io/tig/

it is part of my workflow for years. I prefer direct git commands. But sometimes it is nice to explore history and complex changes there. And most of the parameters are the same as `git diff ...` just `tig ...` with (almost always) same values for the ellipsis.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#32

Does this handle LFS file-locking? Very handy for repos with lots of binaries (eg game dev), but also almost wholly unimplemented in the most popular Git GUI clients.

SmartGit supports it too but I find that even with access to it, its less useful than with something like P4 simply because git style ends up using more branches and locks don't work across branches.

How do you end up dealing with that?

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#33
My choice is the VCS client in JetBrains IDEs, like IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm etc.

IntelliJ Community Edition is even free and open-source, so for Java coding it's perfect, but pretty good for Clojure, Python, PHP too.

The JetBrains IDEs are cross-platform, including Linux and cross architecture, including ARM, because the JVM/JDK is cross-arch.

The sticking point for me is how well it deals with the 3-way resolution of merge conflicts.

It also has a magic-wand icon, which seems to resolve 95% of conflicts automatically and correctly, presumably doing something based on common ancestor commits.

BUT what makes both this 3-way merge interface AND the commit interface really great, is the ability to edit in-place, with all your custom keybindings, syntax highlighting, linting and code intelligence tools!

You can auto-complete code, look up docs or the source code of function definitions, even in JAR files, without leaving the context of the commit dialog. If you need to do something more involved, like refactoring or jump to definition, u can always get to the source code with F4 from the commit dialog or from within any commit context.

You don't know what are you missing out on, until you experience it! It's a significant reduction in mental overhead, imho.

Now the cost of all this convenience is that you need to download hundreds of megabytes and IntelliJ CE has a substantial startup time and memory consumption, since it indexes your code. It also sprinkles your repo with projects files under a .idea folder.

I will check out Fork regardless, because it's good to know what's out there and what are the different set of tradeoffs it choose. Then I can choose and/or recommend it for different situations.

It's the same reason I'm learning vc.el and magit too. If you need to do some git surgery over high-latency SSH, then it's hard to beat Emacs with TRAMP...

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#34
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not the GP. I don’t like subscriptions and looked at Fork after your comment. I couldn’t find the policy on versions and upgrades. Is it a one time purchase with updates for major versions or for a period of time (after which updates wouldn’t be available) or a one time purchase forever (how would the developers and the product survive)? The purchase page says one license is for up to three computers. It doesn’t…

Hi! I develop Fork with my wife. We don't have manager, marketing team, designers, etc. We also don't have meetings which makes us more efficient :). So, we don't need too much money to survive. Answering your question, yes, it's a one-time purchase which includes future updates. We may release a major paid update in the future, however currently we don't have plans for that. The license is cross-platform. You can ac…

GP here. Thanks for your detailed reply. Please add this information on your website, maybe on the license page or elsewhere.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#35
I struggled with anything besides committing or pushing when I first started using Git. People keep trying to make better GUI's to account for this, but going and in and learning how to use the command line and reading Pro Git really was the best solution. It's so much easier to work with.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#36
post #28

The UI does look really good, but I do wonder how much of the dev community uses a GUI vs just sticking in the command line? Personally the only GUI stuff I find useful are the features that are already part of VSCode (live showing what I have changed or doing a diff). Outside of that I generally find that any GUI for git just inevitably makes something just opaque enough that I don't really know for sure what I am a…

I use both the git CLI and Fork for different tasks. For the `git add` workflow you describe I use the CLI exclusively, and for interactive rebase it's about half and half.

An example where Fork comes in handy is deleting branches, especially on remotes. It's pleasant to see all the branches and just click on the ones I want to delete, and not have to deal with git CLI's differences between deleting local and remote branches, or remember how git deletes remote branches this week.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#37
I've been looking for a new client. It really only needs a couple things:

* Be fast

* Let me do line-by-line staging/reverting

* Automatically wrap commit message bodies past a given line length, and warn if titles are similarly too long.

If it does that, I am happy.

I've been using Git-cola, but it's slow. Every action incurs some delay, even simple ones. (Can't use VSCode for reasons)

The problem is most of the alternatives are either subscription (eww) or quite pricey. Fork is one of the cheaper ones, been meaning to try it.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#38
I tried a few Git clients over the years and am proficient with the CLI.

My impression is that Fork captures how git actually works better than some of the other GUI tools and it has a lot of handy features that make certain tasks a pleasure instead of a chore (common rebasing things, add/deleting/changing local/remote branches, splitting up changes in single files into multiple commits - this is maybe be an antipattern but I do it frequently enough).

Also, it's very cheap. I hope they make enough money with it to continue development.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#39

I've been looking for a new client. It really only needs a couple things: * Be fast * Let me do line-by-line staging/reverting * Automatically wrap commit message bodies past a given line length, and warn if titles are similarly too long. If it does that, I am happy. I've been using Git-cola, but it's slow . Every action incurs some delay, even simple ones. (Can't use VSCode for reasons) The problem is most of the al…

I think it doesn't count characters in the body but I am sure Dan could add this as optional feature (though I think it's a bad idea to enforce 80 chars there. Maybe a max line length would be better).

Also, I think it doesn't enforce the limits but counts down letters and if you're above the 50 chars for the message it shows a negative char count in bright red (which makes me reconsider what I want to tell my coworkers in that message).

The other points should be fulfilled.

Re: Git Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Windows and Mac

#40
post #39

I've been looking for a new client. It really only needs a couple things: * Be fast * Let me do line-by-line staging/reverting * Automatically wrap commit message bodies past a given line length, and warn if titles are similarly too long. If it does that, I am happy. I've been using Git-cola, but it's slow . Every action incurs some delay, even simple ones. (Can't use VSCode for reasons) The problem is most of the al…

I think it doesn't count characters in the body but I am sure Dan could add this as optional feature (though I think it's a bad idea to enforce 80 chars there. Maybe a max line length would be better). Also, I think it doesn't enforce the limits but counts down letters and if you're above the 50 chars for the message it shows a negative char count in bright red (which makes me reconsider what I want to tell my cowork…

My statement about the character limits was incorrect and ambiguous. Git-cola is similar. It displays the number of characters and a color. No color for up to 64, yellow to 72, orange to 78, and red above that.

The body wraps the next word onto a new line if it crosses past 72 characters. (By default, that is configurable and disable-able)

Those are fairly arbitrary choices, but they work well enough for me in practice and help keep my titles/messages clean and readable.

If Fork could do something similar (the auto-wrapping and title warning) I'd be happy.

Post reply on HN