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

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

#41

Post by cyphar »

SyneRyder wrote: post #23
undergrowth54 wrote: post #5

Alongside a donation link, you should put a "purchase a license" or "purchase a subscription" link. That way, an engineer can upload the resulting receipt to expensify and get reimbursed by their employer. Employers are used to paying for software licenses out of engineering budgets; Donations would generally come out of a different budget managed by someone an engineer doesn't work with day-to-day.

Another +1 for them adding a price to this. It's a really good program and even as a solo indie developer, I want to give them money so they can afford to keep working on it. Customer support takes time too, I've already emailed them about one bug & used up some minutes of the developer's time. Preferably not a subscription, though. The whole reason I started using Fork is because their competitor Tower switched to a…

I think the point is that it should remain a free project but put an artificial "price" instead of a donation link. This is similar to what SQLite does (offering a $1000 license, where you're basically paying for a piece of paper saying "no really, you can use this freely").

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

#42

Post by MarkSweep »

The license prohibits all kinds of things so I am not comfortable using it: https://fork.dev/license

Specifically, it says:

* "You will not use this Software to engage in or allow others to engage in any illegal activity.": Which jurisdiction? how far do I have to go to prevent illegal activity?

* "You will not engage in using this Software that will interfere with or damage the operation of the services of any third parties[...]" How is this defined? How quickly can I push the "git pull" button before I violate this term?

* "You will not use this Software to engage in any activity that will violate the rights of third parties, including, without limitation, [...]" again, which jurisdiction?

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

#43

Post by pjtr »

jmiserez wrote: post #20
pjtr wrote: post #17

Why do merge tools pretend that "their" and "our" or "remote" and "local" are good labels? Can they not show the commit message and hash? Nowadays with history editing often both sides are local and mine.

Did you see the screenshots? Looks like it shows the branches at least.

I did see the screenshots. That's what triggered my comment. I did not see any branch names. Now I see "nh-scroll-fix" and "origin/fix-simulate-na..." in the conflict dialog, but not in the merge dialog. Branch names seem insufficient anyway though, but it would be a slight improvement I guess.

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

#44

Post by paol »

groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

At the very minimum, having the local file status and recent history visible in a window at all times (i.e. a permanent 'git status', 'git log' and 'git diff' view) makes a GUI worthwhile. I can't even imagine working without that.

Another thing a GUI can be superior is operating on arbitrary subsets of files. E.g. imagine you have 100 new files and want to 'git add' an arbitrary subset of them; doing this in a GUI is far faster than the command line. (This is equivalent to shell vs. file manager - some operations are done more efficiently in the command line, some in a GUI.)

Then there's all sorts of niceties that a GUI can provide to speed up your work. E.g. git is very anal about what can be done if your local tree isn't clean, requiring often a stash-operation-unstash workflow. Smartgit (my weapon of choice, highly recommended) does it for me when required. More niceties I appreciate: reordering commits with a simple drag-and-drop; a diff/merge view to use during conflicts, or just to add a subset of file changes instead of whole files; jumping between repos with a single click. I'm probably forgetting a few.

TL;DR You can pry Smartgit from my cold dead hands.

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

#45

Post by machiaweliczny »

groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

Better code review than git diff, easy to commit only subset and faster way to view all changes in commits. I'm using GitUp and it's really good although not maintained anymore.

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

#46

Post by hnarn »

MarkSweep wrote: post #42

The license prohibits all kinds of things so I am not comfortable using it: https://fork.dev/license Specifically, it says: * "You will not use this Software to engage in or allow others to engage in any illegal activity.": Which jurisdiction? how far do I have to go to prevent illegal activity? * "You will not engage in using this Software that will interfere with or damage the operation of the services of any third…

What a silly license. Why do people insist on rolling their own? It's quite amazing to me, especially when it comes to things like cryptography and legal texts. Surely any lawyer could point at these phrases and say what you're saying now -- how do you define this? Sure, you could argue that keeping it vague is a way to protect the authors, but I'd argue that a competent lawyer would write it in a less vague way, to protect the authors even more -- if it was necessary. Is it? I doubt it, considering the type of software we see under insanely brief licenses like the MIT.

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

#47

Post by OJFord »

Bootwizard wrote: post #36
groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

Basically, in GUIs the most common commands are represented in UI, and some combined into a single action. Also, visually viewing the entire tree (not sure the name for the entire branching structure) can be helpful to debugging and fixing issues caused by merging, accidental overwrites, etc. The disadvantages are: - cherry picking commits is not easy - lacks advanced (read uncommon) commands - sometimes git errors a…

> visually viewing the entire tree [branching structure]

You can do that with git CLI no problem, it's one of my most used aliases (so I can't recall exactly the underlying command) - just flags to log. --pretty=oneline --all --decorate is the key bit iirc.

While I'm at it, my hands down most used alias is 'fixup', which takes a ref, commits with message 'fixup! ' and rebases with whatever flag makes it turn that into 'fixup' instead of 'pick' automatically. i.e. it's commit --amend for older commits.

Recently I added fzsha and fzfile too, which use fzf to fuzzy find a SHA/file, and call the git command given as $1 with it and any other supplied args. So git fzfile add stages whatever I choose in fzf, and likewise git fzsha fixup amends a fuzzy-found commit.

These GUIs look pretty, but I've no desire to learn one when it inevitably misses some things I use frequently, and adds new features I don't have, sure, but no (quick, maybe it's open source and .. sure) way of adding my own.

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

#48

Post by Someone »

Bootwizard wrote: post #36
groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

Basically, in GUIs the most common commands are represented in UI, and some combined into a single action. Also, visually viewing the entire tree (not sure the name for the entire branching structure) can be helpful to debugging and fixing issues caused by merging, accidental overwrites, etc. The disadvantages are: - cherry picking commits is not easy - lacks advanced (read uncommon) commands - sometimes git errors a…

”cherry picking commits is not easy”

That always baffles me in git UIs. You have your list of branches on the left, list of commits in the current branch on the right (haven’t checked this client, but it likely has that), so why can’t I drag one of those commits on top of a branch to cherry-pick it?

Similarly, changing git commits shouldn’t need a separate dialog, and reordering commits could be done in-place by drag and drop (probably with a warning if done on commits that have been pushed). Yes, that’s less efficient and may occasionally lead to more or harder merge conflicts than doing complex rebase’s in one go, but it’s the GUI way.

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

#49

Post by djeikyb »

groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

i mostly use the git cli. i even like it; despite some ux problems! i've often been the one teaching git, and always make sure junior hires learn at least a little bit of git cli. but i do use a few extra interfaces.

1. complex staging operations. i do a lot of partial staging. staging by line or hunk is good enough most of the time. sometimes though i want a little more. maybe only part of a line, or parts of multiple lines. or even edit the staged content directly! i haven’t used eclipse in a few years, but its staging ui was great. side by side diff, working tree on one side, stage on the other. like resolving a merge conflict. full syntax highlighting, both sides editable. i haven’t found another tool like it. even primitive staging tools (like fork, tower, and tig) that don't do anything fancier than `git add -p` tend to be more useful to me, just because it's so quick to change your mind. no need to type out an unstage command then go through a bunch of screens. just drag and drop, or highlight and click.

2. studying history of a class or function. i use a jetbrains ide, and it makes it super easy to jump through the full history of a file. it's just git blame, but you don't have to copy and paste the ref to blame. very quickly you can see a bunch of versions all at once, and diff between them.

3. perusing git history. mostly, i use git-log and git-show. but sometimes, i want to see the git graph and quickly see the contents of individual nodes. a normal advanced scenario is, show me the full git graph, highlighting commits that touch a particular file, and let me quickly see the contents of those commits. i can do that with the cli, but it's way faster in other tools. if it's simple enough, i use tig right in my terminal. if my ide doesn't support the more complex cases, git-gui does.

4. interactive rebase. i don't know any tools where this doesn't suck. i'm rebasing against origin/master.. is it towards the top or towards the bottom? what files are in the commits i'm manipulating? what are the contents of those files? why can't i jump around between them without starting a new rebase session? i think there's potential for radically different tooling around interactive rebase, especially inside an ide. i'm used to the git cli. i interactive rebase constantly without any trouble. but my team mates don't, and it's not cause they're stupid or lazy. i just got really interested and put a ton of effort into learning it.

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

#50

Post by srikz »

This looks neat! It will be great to have a Linux version in the future.

I’m not too hopeful as this seems to be made native to the platforms (and very well!) by experienced native devs. Maybe, the app becomes very popular and there will eventually be a Linux version of such good quality.

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