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

From: Nigel Magnay <nigel.magnay@gmail.com>
Date: May 22, 2008, 20:55 UTC
Message-ID: <320075ff0805221355y6d5dd4dcgdd12fad9582ea588@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080520203153.GH29038@spearce.org>

Show 17 quoted lines

> I'm not worried about users leaving git-gui.  Hell, if git-gui
> was just git on training wheels and all git users left git-gui
> after a while for the command line that would be telling as it
> says the graphical interface is not desired.  Or that git-gui's
> interface is not well suited to the task.
>
> Far from it.  Some users like git-gui for its ability to show
> the modified files, and let you stage/unstage individual hunks.
> Others like its ability to perform checkout+pull in one mouse
> click.  Many like to point at things with a rodent than to use
> the keyboard and enter (to them) isoteric commands.
>
> Right now there are really only two git GUIs; git-gui and QGit.
> Each has its strengths.  Maybe this time next year we will have
> a 3rd; name yet to be determined but it would come out of the
> egit/jgit project as a stand-alone SWT/Java based Git UI.
>

I have to say - git is the first SCM that I've used that commandline usage is actually pleasant in - so much so, the lack of easy cut&paste from 'git status' in colleagues cygwin windows becomes a serious pain!

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'. It'd be nice to be able to add files / directories to .gitignore, and to view the staged/unstaged changes as trees - helpful for when a build has created a non-ignored directory with thousands of files. 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.

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