
Moving and renaming files on GitHub - geetarista
https://github.com/blog/1436-moving-and-renaming-files-on-github
======
smoyer
Using the .. to traverse up the directory tree during a move operation is
simply beautiful!

~~~
modarts
I was just going to comment on that. Awesome example of a well targeted UX
enhancement given the developer audience (this way of traversing a directory
obviously wouldn't work for a product developed for terminal-averse users)

------
tommoor
A neat feature, another step towards GitHub becoming the development IDE.

~~~
msoad
Imagine if you get VI keyboard shortcuts for editor...

------
bentaber
Solid use of animated gifs to get the point across.

~~~
benackles
You rarely see an animated gif used for a practical purpose. It's usually
followed by hysterical laughter. At least that's usually the intent.

------
dfrey
How does this work? Is each rename a commit? That would really clutter up your
history if for example you are trying to rename 10 .cc files to .cpp

~~~
cobychapple
Yes. Each rename (and any updates to content that happen at the same time) is
just a new commit on the branch you do the edit on. It should produce
identical history to doing the same operation via the command-line :)

~~~
masklinn
On the command line, I can do multiple renames in a single commit/

~~~
mtodd
If you want to do multiple renames in one commit then the command line is
likely the best way.

~~~
buttscicles
Alternatively use this feature and squash them later when you have access to a
terminal.

~~~
mineo
In that case you'd need to either force the next push because squashing
rewrites history or use a separate branch to do the renames in the first
place.

------
hawkw
Hooray! Now I can do all my work directly on GitHub.

------
habosa
So now I can just do my work on Github. If Heroku could somehow auto pull and
deploy I could approximate a reasonable workflow anywhere I have a browser.
This is certainly awesome for hotfixes on the go when you're on some public
computer.

~~~
modarts
Check out Cloud 9 IDE. I found that I don't even need my high end MBPr to do
my development work; and am getting by on my relatively under powered air.

~~~
creativename
I second this - I've had great success using just Cloud9 for development and
pushing to GitHub/Heroku

------
bruth
This is no good. I respect the UX of this feature, however I don't want new
users to learn their git conventions in a browser, this way. I am not sure
what GitHub's plan is for taking over the world.. but it would great for new
users, if for each of their in-browser actions they provided help text that
showed the corresponding CLI command. This reinforces their intent of these
kinds of features.

EDIT: That is humorous.. I write the above only to see this:
<http://try.github.com/>. It does not invalidate my argument, but it
reinforces GitHub's motivation.

------
recursive
Exciting. One step closer to never having to learn how to use git.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Which scares me. If the basic stuff can be done without git, but not the more
advanced stuff, and beginners start to not learn git, they'll be hopeless when
they need to do some sort of more advanced operation.

~~~
zevyoura
Isn't that already the case in practice? Tons of devs just know git
commit/push/pull and can't do much more without research.

------
joejohnson
What does this do to the commit history for moved files?

~~~
dunsudu
I guess it just checks the new file in and removes the old one. Git doesn't
track file moves, except a posteriori.

