Friday, December 15, 2017

Using GitUp

I’ve recently rediscovered GitUp, and I like it much better now than the first time around. I’m not sure whether this is due to improvements in the app itself or simply my better understanding from reading the documentation and listening to this podcast. The user interface is non-standard—and to me not very self-explanatory—but it is actually very functional once you know how to use it.

Update (2018-01-03): One annoyance I’ve found is that you cannot see from the Commit view, which is where I live, whether there are changes that you need to push or pull. So it’s easy to switch Macs and leave some changes stranded.

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I had used it when it was new, and just tried using it again — unfortunately like every other Mac Git client I try, I keep on coming back to (ancient, essentially unmaintained) GitX, along with the command line and Emacs’ Magit for some special cases such as interactive rebase.

GItUp's map is essentially 'mystery meat navigation' in the absence of context — it's really hard to understand why it's designed like this at all. Same for the unresizable list of commit messages and the commit view taking over your entire screen, losing any context in the process. I'm not sure what is "broken' with the email-style multipane view of commits. Along with the lack of state saving in the split views, resizing a commit view oddly scrolls the entire view down as you drag. There's no adjustment for context/hunk granularity in the unified diff view, which often means you see way more context than is actually useful.

The diff view does seem to be about the speed of GitX, but it's also rather space-inefficient as the filenames are next to, rather than above, the diffs so you end up having to make the window incredibly wide.

I guess I should be happy I have one app I can stand? :-)

[…] need to use the Reflog, but it’s good that it’s now available. Search is improved, but GitUp is still better as searching content. The file history view is better in some ways, but it no […]

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