Re: That improved git-gui blame viewer..

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

I think a lot of people are going to enjoy the git-gui blame viewer..

I don't generally do "git blame" very much at all, and I've found that any time I do it (even historically - when I've used bk annotate and even CVS), I have invariably _always_ wanted to go back in history to see the blame of the *previous* version (because the commit that gets blamed initially is simply not interesting, and is just whitespace cleanups or whatever!).

Now, this was something I knew very well on an intellectual level, and I tried to explain in one of my early discourses on why "annotate" is such a horribly interface, and why git could do so much better, but it's something that I think "git-gui blame" is showing that could really be done.

Now, admittedly, git-gui seems buggy in this regard (I *think* you meant that the two commits that show up listed to the left of each line are the "before and after" commit, but they end both being the "after" commit for me, but I can almost *taste* git-gui doing the right thing here. And once it does that, I think a lot of people will start to realize how useful this kind of interactive "drill down into the history of a line" thing can be.

So I think git-gui isn't quite there yet, but I think it's getting pretty close. It would need

 - the afore-mentioned bug fixed (I _think_ it is a bug, but maybe you had 
   some other reason for having two separate columns of commits per line), 
   so that you can literally click on the *previous* version of a line and 
   say "I don't care about this commit, I want to see the previous one".

 - I'd love to see a "go to most recent change" thing (the way _I_ work, I 
   tend to peel history, so I often look at recent changes, but if that 
   one isn't interesting, I'd go to the "previous version" and then again 
   ask for "go to the most recent change".

 - I like the floating tooltip showing what the commit was, but I think it 
   could be extended a bit more to perhaps literally show what the 
   previous contents of that chunk were (again, that's useful for the "am 
   I interested in _this_ commit, or should I just dig down to the 
   previous one")

But yes, the current git-gui blame is already quite interesting. It's not "all that it could be", but it has gone from "Whee, that looks so ugly that I need to find me a couple of spoons to dig out my eyeballs with" to "Hey, I can see this being _really_ good".

		Linus