Re: git gui: Possible to see which commands are executed?

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: May 22, 2008, 23:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20080522230545.GR29038@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <320075ff0805221355y6d5dd4dcgdd12fad9582ea588@mail.gmail.com>

Nigel Magnay <nigel.magnay@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> git-gui is good though - but there's a few things I wish it had. I
> often find the need to flip between git gui and gitk (for a 'where the
> heck am I at the moment' overview) - the 2 tools seems to confuse
> people coming at git, even given 'visualize branch'.

Yup. I haven't tried to reimplement a visualizer in git-gui, nor have I tried to embed gitk into git-gui. Both would take a great deal of work I think (though embedding gitk is likely easier) and I just have too many things going on to pursue this myself. If someone showed patches for this, I'd definately try to get them included.

> It'd be nice to
> be able to add files / directories to .gitignore,

Always been a "wishlist" feature for git-gui. Paul Mackerras' gitool prototype (which is what seeded git-gui) had this feature, but it was never carried into git-gui. Again, patches welcome. :-)

> and to view the
> staged/unstaged changes as trees - helpful for when a build has
> created a non-ignored directory with thousands of files.

Yea. And when that happens to me I immediately slap the directory into my .gitignore or .git/info/exclude and rescan to make the huge pile of untracked files disappear. So a tree view in git-gui has never been something I wanted. Trees in Tcl/Tk are also horrible to implement. The toolkit just has never been very good at that sort of thing.

> Maybe I
> should get qgit - but git gui has the massive advantage of being in
> every install by default, and so is available in msysgit.

Yes, I have to admit that git-gui's popularity among git users has a _lot_ to do with the simple fact that it ships out of the box as part of Junio's git releases. Since most git users have Tcl/Tk available so they can use gitk, git-gui is also ready-to-go, with no extra libs needed on your system.

However, QGit is also a good program, and has many loyal users.
There are benefits and drawbacks to both GUIs.

> Whilst I'm thinking about it - I'm surprised in retrospect how little
> prominence the index is given in the frontends I've seen.

Really?  git-gui is all about the index.

> It's easy,
> coming from SVN, to gloss over the index as the same as just checking
> off files at commit time, and miss stuff like 'git add --patch' and
> 'git mergetool' altogether.

Right click on a hunk in the diff pane in git-gui and stage/unstage it? Its about as good as `git add --patch`. Or better, depending on how you work.

-- 
Shawn.