Monday, September 2, 2024

Retcon 1.0

Nathan Manceaux-Panot (Reddit, Hacker News):

Rewrite Git history with a single drag-and-drop. Undo anything with ⌘Z. All speed, no bumps.

[…]

From small refinements to sweeping reworks, you do everything faster in Retcon. Edits take fewer steps, and don’t mess with the repo’s state.

This seems really cool, though it’s not really a replacement for a general-purpose Git client. There’s a 14-day trial, after which it’s $49.99/year. For me, at least, complicated history rewriting is not very common, and Tower can do much of it—and has undo—albeit not as smoothly. Perhaps it would make sense to subscribe for a month at a time now and then when it’s needed to get out of a jam.

Previously:

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For me, at least, complicated history rewriting is not very common, and Tower can do much of it—and has undo—albeit not as smoothly

This. There has been very little I can't undo with a branching, a hard reset on the original, and some very careful cherry picking.

I would recommend to people new to git to not worry about having a beautiful history. Branches and commits are cheap. Use them and don't worry about your history a hundredth as much as the end result. I'm almost afraid of the force pushes this Retcon app could introduce if it "falls into the wrong hands".

You [new to git folks] will want to get really familiar with a true 3-way merge tool like KDiff3, though... ;^)


Pierre Lebeaupin

"The Git history is a communication tool" oh, dear. Revisionists would be proud. I don't think you need to be the son of a history teacher to have qualms about this marketing, if not the product itself.

(also, speaking of KDiff3… https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kdiff3/-/issues/46 )

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