
Show HN: GitHub and Bitbucket browsing reimagined - sdesol
http://gitsense.github.io/
======
charlieegan3
I've installed, looking forward to trying it out. So far I've found a number
of GitHub extensions useful, namely: Awesome Autocomplete
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-awesome-
aut...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-awesome-
autocomple/djkfdjpoelphhdclfjhnffmnlnoknfnd?hl=en) and Octotree
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjah...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjahfmjljalopjnoealnfndnagc)

~~~
sdesol
Yeah there are a lot of interesting plugins out there and like the ones that
you mentioned, enhances GitHub productivity by quite a bit. GitHub is
certainly an enigma at the moment.

You have a situation like Bitbucket where they are focused on creating a
product that is designed to be built on top of, but they really aren't getting
a lot of love.

[https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/app/bitbucket](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/app/bitbucket)

GitHub on the other hand, requires you to parse DOM objects, but people are
still building on top of it. I'd have to imagine there will be some turning
point in the future, where this will change. If GitLab and Bitbucket can sort
out its UX, I can see developers focusing more on developing for their
platform.

~~~
sytse
We're working to improve the GitLab UX, anything you would like to see? BTW
we're thinking about shipping Octotree as part of GitLab
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/13723](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13723)

~~~
sdesol
> We're working to improve the GitLab UX, anything you would like to see?

The issue with GitLab's UX right now, is there is a lot of little things,
which adds up to big things. This is expected since UX is hard and if you look
at GitHub's interface from 5 years ago, they (GitHub) would probably feel
embarrassed by some of the things that they have done.

For things to improve, you need a lot of feedback/iterations and I won't be
surprised if GitHub's UX evolution was the result of strong feedback from
designers outside of GitHub. By being the first movers, GitHub was able to
attract everybody, which included designers.

GitLab right now is not attractive for designers. To overcome this, I would
personally put some resources into showcasing how you can tweak GitLab's CSS
without having to dig into Ruby or JavaScript or anything else. And if it is
not easy to do, design GitLab so it is.

Right now the fonts in GitLab really bug me, and I want to use the font that
GitHub is using. GitHub has really nailed fonts among other things.

If there was a simple way for people to tweak GitLab's UX without having to
understand anything else, I can see it drawing in a lot more people and
creating a lot more feedback. Also create a way for people to showcase their
tweaks. I'm sure 90% of them will be crap, but that 10% can make all the
difference in the world.

I might be over analyzing things, but I think GitLab's desire to be no longer
called a "GitHub clone" is creating too many poor design decisions. The recent
move to put the search icon in the middle of the search text field is an
example of this. I'm pretty sure designers at Google, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.
played around with the icon placement and found that putting it in the middle
was not a good idea. If it was a good idea, we would have seen more
sites/products adopt this.

So to make the long story short, to improve your UX situation, make it
insanely easy for designers to tweak things and to share/showcase their
tweaks.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

To summarize:

1\. Make a blog post how to tweak's GitLab CSS

2\. Consider using another font

3\. Allow people to showcase their work

4\. Move the search icon back to the left

One thing we can't do is customizing the interface of GitLab (except for the
colors) since this causes things to break without a lot of testing.

1\. Good idea [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-
posts/issues/153](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/153)

2\. I've shared this suggestion with our team, if you care deeply about it
consider opening an issue on [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues)

3\. As a showcase we ask people to open a merge request on
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests)
with before/after screenshots

4\. I've made [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/13919](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13919)

Thanks again for the feedback and keep it coming.

------
sdesol
Hi,

I'm the creator behind GitSense and I'm going to start private beta trials in
about a week or two. Right now I'm trying to line up some cloud host providers
so you can install our indexing technology in the cloud for free.

If you use GitHub or Bitbucket and would like to have your private/public Git
repositories more searchable, among other things, please send an email to
privatebeta@gitsense.com

If you have any technical questions, post them here and I'll try my best to
answer them.

------
fiatjaf
I'll install it and test for some days.

I find it hard to get used to these new environments, but I approve the effort
put on GitSense.

As a side note, I just released a Chrome Extension[1] that does improve GitHub
browsing with a small single change: it adds links to imported
packages/modules so you can just click on the name of the module being
imported and get access to its documentation or code.

[1]: [http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/gh-browser/](http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/gh-
browser/)

~~~
sdesol
It looks like your extension behaves in a similar manner to

[https://github.com/octo-linker/chrome-extension](https://github.com/octo-
linker/chrome-extension)

Might be worthwhile to integrate your changes with it, as there will probably
be collisions if both extensions are installed.

~~~
fiatjaf
Thank you for pointing this.

------
pdeva1
for most repos I dont see any data. Clicking on 'commits' I see the msg:
'GitSense is not available for this repository'

~~~
sdesol
Yeah right now, we have one server that is indexing about 5000 popular repos.
We are trying to index repos with 1000+ stars. Below is a quick snapshot of
what is being indexed.

[http://imgur.com/3y5HGT4](http://imgur.com/3y5HGT4)

When we make the GitSense indexer available, you'll be able to index whatever
repositories you want.

Right now there is no practical way to index tens of thousands of repositories
because we'd get shutdown pretty quickly for abusing GitHub resources.

