Re: [ANNOUNCE] ugit: a pyqt-based git gui // was: Re: If you would write git from scratch now, what would you change?

From: Jason Sewall <jasonsewall@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 12, 2007, 05:13 UTC
Message-ID: <31e9dd080712112113u44b30c62ja012951fba958c5d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20071212041002.GN14735@spearce.org>

On Dec 11, 2007 11:10 PM, Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Jason Sewall <jasonsewall@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Anyway, ugit is very good for a first draft; its text display beats
> > whats in git-gui in a big way (and I would *hope* qt4 would beat
> > Tcl/Tk at that at least).
>
> Are you just using the wrong fonts under git-gui?  I mean both
> Tk and qt4 are drawing text through your windowing system, from
> the same pool of font files... if qt4 can draw nice text then
> so can Tk, right?

I don't know much about graphical toolkits and the like, but I think that the more modern ones have fancy features like antialiasing and subpixel rendering, which makes a big difference when you're working on a laptop with a tiny screen.

Take a look for yourself: http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/492/comparejd6.png

They are obviously using different fonts there (because I can't figure out what font ugit is using) but there is a difference in rendering quality to be sure.

The qt stuff fits better with the rest of my system better too (even though I'm using gnome) - it's entirely the result of Tk being lightweight and a million years old, when UI conventions were different (like every menu being detachable, and antique scrollbars). I'm not here to start a toolkit flame war (we had a toolkit dogpile on the list last week, I think) I'm just pointing out that Tk is from a different era.

I use git-gui and gitk for my git graphical needs because they rock and at the end of the day, the fonts and antialiasing aren't that big of a deal, especially since I'm usually doing quick scans and searches over the information those tools display, not reading novels in them.

Jason