
GitHub Desktop 1.0 - danso
https://github.com/blog/2437-announcing-github-desktop-1-0
======
holydude
I'll add to the Electron hating bandwagon. Not every native app is good and
often the UI and design feels crappy. I mean this was the case for decades.
But I will still prefer crappy looking performant app over nice looking
sluggish electron app.

I really really would not want to use a "productivity" type of application
that is made in Electron but I also know that many people do not mind.

This said we are again in the era where it does not matter to most of the
users. If it would people would stop using Atom/VScode and others. We all know
that there is not a more cost effective way of building multiplatform apps
(all things considered).

We will have to cope with this as long as there is not real competition.

~~~
siddhant
On a related note - are there any frameworks you could use to write native-ish
Mac apps without knowing Objective C or Swift?

~~~
pixelmonk
RubyMotion

~~~
holydude
Also Xamarin

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Exuma
I really like the old version better. I really dislike this "cross platform"
crap that runs terrible. It's like using a javascript app. Not only that, they
don't even have it for Linux, so what's the point of doing a cross platform
interface...

~~~
danielbarla
It's built with Electron, so it's not just _like_ using a javascript app, you
are actually using one.

That said, I personally don't have a huge issue with Electron apps on face
value - some of them (VSCode, for example) seem to outperform their native
counterparts quite handily (in this case, VS - install time, upgrade time,
cold start time, warm start time, actual usage). That tells me that the
implementation choices affect performance as much as the underlying
technology.

~~~
Olreich
VSCode doesn't beat SublimeText, Vim, Emacs, or Notepad++.

Electron apps might beat other electron apps (VSCode over Atom), but we're
still a long sight off from electron apps beating compiled ones in most cases.

~~~
Akujin
Maybe for you.

None of your alternatives have built in JavaScript debugging or multiple
projects per workspace.

~~~
Olreich
I was replying to the performance of the application.

Debugging: Fair enough. VSCode is starting to stray toward IDE, which the
others described specifically exclude. They focus on the text editing and
leave the debugging for other specialized programs. VSCode would make sense to
be an IDE since it's coming from a Visual Studio lineage though.

Multiple Projects per Workspace: Sublime has this as a project can have any
number of folders added to it. A sublime project is equivalent to a VSCode
Workspace unless I'm missing a nuance somewhere. Vim and Emacs are less useful
in this regard, though they have project management plugins. Most of the time,
Vim and Emacs will just save off a workspace in what they call a "session".
You can load the session and be exactly where you left off (down to the cursor
position). These can also be configured to happen on startup/shutdown.

------
willtim
They've gone to all the trouble of building an app using web technologies, but
don't offer a Linux version? I develop on Linux because I deploy on Linux. I
don't need a virtual assistant or animated emojis. I would quite like a nice
Git UI however.

~~~
timlyo
I still think git-cola is one of my favourite Git Ui's. Anyone know any other
good ones?

~~~
dragandj
[https://github.com/magit/magit](https://github.com/magit/magit)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Seconded, probably the _best_ git UI there is, in terms of feature coverage
and productivity.

Coincidentally, it's currently on Kickstarter[0]. Mind you, this is a fully
functional, mature and free product - the author is just trying to fund next
few years of development.

\--

[0] - [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-
th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical-
git-client)

------
blocked_again
Builds the entire business model on top of git, a tool that Torvalds built to
maintain Linux but don't give a fuck to Linux users.

~~~
kingbirdy
Maybe they just assume linux users are comfortable in the command line?

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favorited
Any Mac users (Windows coming soon, apparently?) wanting a native Git GUI
client should check out Fork. I've been using it for a few months (switched
from one of the various forks of GitX) and love it. It's not open source, but
it is in a free beta. It's well designed, simple, and actually feels like a
Mac app.

git-fork.com

~~~
awill
I wonder what the pricing is going to look like when it's stable. I generally
don't like depending on tools when I don't know the future (like if they'll
use a subscription model).

~~~
favorited
Honestly, there's very little to depend on here. There's nothing this app does
that you can't do in Terminal, and it would be easy to switch to another GUI
tool. This one is just really nice.

------
icholy
As a Linux user I feel pretty left out. I was looking forward to opening,
closing it, and then going back to the terminal.

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ruskimalooski
Not what I was hoping for. I use GitKraken for most of my daily Git stuff and
the CLI when its needed.

I was hoping GUI for more administrative purposes. It would be cool to get
desktop notifications when issues are created, code is pushed, etc. I have yet
to see a tool/extension that integrated with GitHub this deeply.

It definitely seems like this could be useful for those who don't want to mess
with the CLI (which is perfectly reasonable IMO).

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cvburgess
I prefer the old app - not because of electron, but because the UX is worse
now (to me, at least). The old mac app made adding a repo super obvious (there
was a plus button), branches had cleaner names, and the sync button looked
like... a button. Now everything looks slick, but very unintuitive. I would
love to see the ease of use increased considering that advanced users would
probably favor the terminal anyway.

------
praveenperera
Looks nice but I personally prefer the "classic" non-electron app. I'm glad
they are still keeping it around.

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eugenekolo2
Oh, I always wanted to use 4gb of RAM to add files to Git.

~~~
M4v3R
Did you actually tried it and did it use 4GB of RAM for you? I did and it used
about 120 MB of RAM, which is not tiny, but not even in the ballpark of your
figure.

I know hating Electron apps is the new fad, but it would be nice to check the
facts before you grab your fork.

~~~
jrs95
How long did you leave it running? In my experience electronic apps tend to
leak memory for some reason. Atom starts up at a couple hundred megs, and
actually does end up at around 4GB. Same with Slack, although it's gotten
better. I used to actually have a launchd script that killed Slack and
restarted it every 30 minutes to keep the memory usage down.

~~~
M4v3R
I left it running when I first wrote the comment. Went back to it just now,
after nearly two hours, and the memory usage didn't increase. Still at 120-130
MB.

My guess is that compared to Slack, Github app doesn't really do much when
idle. Slack fetches user statuses, new messages, notifications and so on. When
you have an open channel with ongoing conversations that will add up in the
RAM. This app doesn't seem to do anything when idle, so the RAM usage doesn't
increase.

~~~
jrs95
That makes sense. I think with Atom the culprit is likely some poorly written
plugins more than the editor itself, too.

------
mdeira
another native - but paid - alternative not mentioned so far is Tower
([https://www.git-tower.com](https://www.git-tower.com)). Both the Mac and
Windows version are native apps.

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alexmorenodev
Linux?

~~~
4lch3m1st
I'm astonished at the fact that this is made in Electron but no Linux version
is planned whatsoever. There must be a serious blocking reason for that.

~~~
noja
Maybe they thought nobody would use it.

~~~
blocked_again
Yeah. Built the entire business model on top of Git, a tool that Torvalds
build to maintain Linux but won't release an app for Linux because they think
nobody would use it.

~~~
TremendousJudge
What he meant is probably 'nobody would use it because they are comfortable
using git from the command line' (I know I am). Anyway, considering it
shouldn't be hard to distribute in on Linux, I'm not sure why they didn't do
it. Surely it's useful to someone?

------
pjmlp
Sorry, I don't see the value over TortoiseGIT,or any other native client.

------
VeejayRampay
Good job to everyone involved. I understand that people don't like Electron
apps, that Linux this or that, but it's still a lot of work to maintain this
app and I know for a fact that it does help lower the barrier of entry for
non-experienced, budding developers around the world, so keep it up.

------
sandstrom
It makes sense (they can share code between Github Desktop standalone and
their Atom-plugin, which does more or less the same thing as Github Desktop).

Electron has many benefits (lots of people know JS; CSS is better than the
standard macOS tools for GUIs). But with Slack, Atom, Hyper and now Github
Desktop running on Electron, the memory usage is getting painful. They all use
several hundred MBs each, sometimes with multiple processes so even more in
aggregate.

Hopefully with more growth of Electron, there will be more shared resources to
spend on improving its memory usage.

~~~
pjmlp
We were already sharing code between platforms before JavaScript was invented.

This Electron craziness looks like milenials just woke up and never
experimented how nice it was to use MSHTML and XUL applications.

I have high hopes Electron will join them.

~~~
Macha
XUL applications were never that bad? At least Firefox, thunderbird and
songbird, which are the three I'm aware of using. In the case of Firefox and
thunderbird, I'd argue they were for a long time superior to their native
competitors (FF2 for example easily bet the pants off IE6, Safari for Windows,
Konqueror, was Epihany a thing then? though I will give Opera had a much more
performance UI). As for Songbird, it had very low bars to beat WMP or
iTunes/Windows or whatever media player your Linux distribution included that
year.

That said, I didn't use Macs during that period, so maybe they were awful on
Mac or something. I assume Camino existed for a reason.

------
strayamaaate
I’m still using SourceTree, not happily, but everything else I’ve tried is
utter shite. It either breaks on big repos, is horribly slow or just a
usability train wreck.

Has anyone found something that actually works?

~~~
bhj
+1 for SourceTree, mostly for the per-line committing. Curious what about it
makes you unhappy; it's always done what I've asked with minimum fuss.

~~~
strayamaaate
I find it gets slower with each update - have you tried the latest with 6-8
active repos open? It spends most of its time refreshing, even with very few
changes.

I’ve also had some broken commits due to changes not being shown until I hit
refresh.

At least they’ve fixed the large diff lockup’s. And yes, the line and hunk
staging is brilliant.

------
Kpourdeilami
I have been using the beta version of Github's Electron app for a while and
hadn't suspected it might not be a native app. It feels very snappy and quick.

On my laptop, it uses less than 80MB of RAM

~~~
zeugmasyllepsis
Around 80 MB of RAM with my project open in GitHub's Electron-based desktop
app as well.

For comparison, gitk is about 14 MB for the same project.

Overall, GitHub's desktop app seems to have fairly stable memory use in my
experience, though that stable mark seems relatively high compared to native
counterparts. Not nearly as bad as some Electron apps, which seem to have no
ceiling to their memory usage. Not a horrible price to pay, if you can accept
the stable overhead.

~~~
atonse
80 MB for the electron app? Sign me up. My preferred app (Tower) takes 150MB
of memory.

Update: I just installed it and while it does take 80 MB, there are two
"Github Desktop Helper" processes that total another 100 MB.

------
bullfightonmars
Hey guys thanks for the work on this, I've been really impressed with the
interaction and performance on the new Github Desktop. I have been using the
Github Desktop since Github for Mac was in early versions.

It took a little getting used to, but the new version is much smoother and
faster.

Two additions I would love to see ported over from github.com

* A toggle between inline and split diffs * A summary view with all changes on the current branch, not just per file changes

------
mythz
I decided to install this on a new OSX given I thought newer would be better
but I hope this isn't representative of consolidation of a cross-platform
Desktop App as it's measurably worse than both existing GitHub Desktop for
Windows and OSX.

I hope they don't discontinue their existing Windows and OSX Desktop Apps
because this experiment is a value downgrade.

------
PleaseHelpMe
Funny it is based on Electron and it doesnt support Linux. Maybe they think
Linux developers only live in terminal, or they just hate it when someone
criticises Electron consuming too much memory

------
chasing
Electron, which means it's heavy and feels like a website rather than an app.
But worse, the features just don't seem compelling enough to move away from
their existing native app.

~~~
uwu
> heavy and feels like a website rather than an app

the electron app is noticeably faster than the old client for me (on windows)

electron probably also means it'll be easier for them to add features in the
future

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cygned
It always configured my repos to use Git LFS - which is not installed because
I don't use it.

I hope it can be turned off now, I wasn't able to find that setting.

------
uwu
am i using the same clients as everyone here or do people just like
complaining about electron at every opportunity?

the new client is actually much faster for me, it starts up faster (1.5s to
show the gui fully loaded vs 4s to show the gui and another 3s to finish
loading what's on the screen) and there's no lag when using it (unlike with
the old client)

i also prefer the new ui, i find it to be clearer than the old one

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realslimshanky
Why is it not available for a Linux machine?

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jorgemf
What does this add to something like the git integration in intellij idea?
(Linux user here, I cannot test it)

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godzillabrennus
Let me fix the marketing for you:

GitHub desktop is designed for our non Linux users. We felt like you weren't
comfortable with a command line so we targeted you. Minimum system
requirements quad core CPU and 32GB of ram.

~~~
BoorishBears
Making Git more accessible to non-developers (or people not comfortable with a
command line) isn't some horrible thing like you're making it out to be.

~~~
toxican
Serious question...what use is git to a non-developer? I don't think I've ever
used it for anything but code. You're not supposed to use it with huge files,
so that kind of eliminates the one case I was thinking of (graphic design
versioning).

Also if someone is a developer, they're only hurting themselves by not making
an effort to get comfortable with the command line. Like half of my workflow
wouldn't be possible without a familiarity with it.

~~~
BoorishBears
Git-LFS lets you use it with large files, and even without Git-LFS you can
still use it for smaller projects (it's not efficient at all, but for small
teams and small projects you can do it).

Github is making a play to be the "Git for Everyone people". Note they call
out that the new client has image diffs (great for... graphic design
versioning).

They're forming a brand that could eventually compete with stuff like Perforce
on a smaller scale with designers and artists if they can make them feel at
home using "GitHub" (Git + creature comforts from GitHub).

And to the developer point, everyone starts somewhere. As a kid Git didn't
click until I started using visual clients. And "the command line" is a huge
surface to get comfortable with.

------
frozenport
Future Electron apps will open a new tab in Chrome.

