8 Months and Counting: The (harsh) reality of building a product from scratch.

TheCommieAxolotl@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 130 points –
8 Months and Counting.
rela.dev
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Bookmarking this. I have such high hopes for this! I recently went searching for my new git GUI, looking for something free, cross-platform, and simple. Basically what I found is the only one I like is GitKraken, which is not free (I have private projects, which GitKraken paywalls).

If this ends up anything like how these screenshots look, this will be my new client! Do you have a Patreon or other donation mechanism?

Vscode and git lens. If you are older like me, emacs and magit

Isn't there a magit-alike plugin for vscode? I have found it so frustrating working with devs who don't use magit, because most seem to find slightly more advanced git like squash and fixup and cherry picking to be impossibly hard.

For these reasons, I always push for simple and straightforward workflows and many commits and merges. For many people git remains a mistery also after years working on it. I blame the easy-to-use guis, many people learn 2 buttons to press for a workflow, and they never care learning more

I blame the easy-to-use guis

All the people I've worked with seem to use the command line. They just don't know much beyond "commit everything" and basic push/pull/branch/merge.

Conversely I learned most of what they don't know direct from the magit GUI. So I often don't know the specific command arguments. Not a good thing, but only a problem for communicating what to do to others.

Magit is super cool but not exactly easy to use :D

Unfortunately, GitLens is by GitKraken. Seems like they might not restrict it for private repos, though, I'll check it out.

They dont restrict it, I use it with private repos all the time

This^ plus ungit (especially when things go really bad; e.g. force pull/push) seems to be the current ideal git workflow.

Hopefully this project will change that though!

There is Fork. But sadly, it is not available for Linux. Git-fork.com

Fork is only "free" in that the evaluation period is indefinite. This is generous and clicking through the nag isn't a huge deal, but I develop on both Linux and Windows and I need a client that supports both.

Ah, sorry. I didn't see that you require it to be free. It is also not open source IIRC.

Open source is a definite plus, but tbh not a requirement for me. Actively maintained, free, Windows and Linux, and simple. Oh, and it has to have a dark theme 😄

GitHub Desktop works well for me and my workflow; even though the Linux version is only supported by the community (possible thanks to it being open source). The UI is very neat and simple. Yet you can do squash, reorder commits, ammend, commit hunks etc. Dark theme available of course! It integrates with GitHub (for PRs mostly) but afaik isn't tied to GitHub repos.

Thank you so much!

I have a GitHub sponsors page (unsure if i can link it here) under this same name.