

Gitbox - Everyday git [Mac OS X] interface for human beings - shaynesweeney
http://gitbox.pierlis.com/

======
harpastum
I think it's very possible that these pretty wrappers allow people to hobble
along with little to no understanding of how git actually works.

If that's the only way that you'll use version control, it's better than
nothing. On the other hand, I heartily endorse actually learning how the git
model works -- it's not too bad, I promise!

.

Good places to start:

    
    
      [1] Peepcode's "Git Internals" PDF - $9 - short, sweet, to the point
      [2] The Git Community Book [2] - free - thorough (if a bit wordy sometimes)
      [3] Pro Git - free online, $23 dead trees - Haven't read it, same author as [1]
    

[1] <http://peepcode.com/products/git-internals-pdf>

[2] <http://book.git-scm.com/>

[3] <http://progit.org/book/>

~~~
p3ll0n
If you want to learn git, open a terminal and read the man pages, create a
dummy repository, push changes to it, pull from it, clone it, merge it, etc.
Don't start with something like Gitbox because its hides all the details and
more importantly the beauty and elegance of git.

~~~
viraptor
I think that's the point of the project - to hide the details. I'm a developer
of project X, but a user of git. I don't care about it - I want to see it as
little as possible, because it's just another tool. Whether it's beautiful or
not, I've got a work to do.

It's a bit like with the compiler: it can be pretty and all, but ultimately I
just want to write `make` and get my binary. When I _need_ the details, I know
where to find them.

~~~
schacon
I would argue that your SCM tool should be less like a compiler that just
needs to get out of your way and just do it's job how you expect it and more
like a text editor. Do you use emacs or vim, which have learning curves but
are powerful and help you ultimately do your job much better and more
efficiently? Or do you use Notepad, which just edits text and who cares? I
think most developers prefer Emacs or Vim or even an IDE. You invest time in a
more complex tool so that you can be a better developer.

That being said, I think this will be useful for a lot of less-techy designers
or copy-editors or QA people, etc. People who can just open stuff in Notepad
because they don't need to craft code.

------
po
This looks pretty ok but I have to say it again: Gitx is awesome. I use this
every day.

<http://gitx.frim.nl/seeit.html>

You can also try out the experimental fork version:

<http://wiki.github.com/brotherbard/gitx/>

------
KirinDave
They're going to need to do a lot more UI work before I'd even consider this
over GitX. Right now it looks like a less useful, less pretty, more confusing
version of GitX.

~~~
jshen
i've always found gitx to be very confusing for simple things. I.e. viewing a
single file at a few different points in the history.

frankly, gitx is a low bar

~~~
KirinDave
Yes, it is. That's the problem.

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kljensen
God I wish I understood GIT. The screenshot here doesn't help me in any way.
Tempted to stick with gitx. What is the advantage of this software?

~~~
melling
Sign up for a github account. It's free and they have help. If you're on
Windows, I've been told TortoiseGit is good.

<http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/>

~~~
nailer
I like github too. It's very understandable - I find it better than the app
shown here - and the help is great.

------
obeattie
I'm still divided how I feel about these things. On the one hand, I actually
find them very useful for staging and unstaging changes and visualizing
branch/merge history, but on the other I worry for the people whose only
interaction with git is via one of these GUI wrappers. To my mind, they keep
you "too far away" from the gears of the version control system, and in this
case a _distributed_ version control system — a very important point to
remember, as people who only use this and never a command line wouldn't have a
hope in hell of using the distributed part of git — rebase a branch? merge in
several heads? I'd like to see them try.

As for this particular one, though, I can't see it offers any advantage over
GitX, apart from the "it's not a RubyCocoa app", which isn't really _that_
great an advantage to my mind…

------
thethimble
It seems to me that a lot of popular Unix-originated software seems to have
really high learning curves (Vim comes to mind).

I wish projects like git spent more efforts on things like GUIs.

Does anybody know of any Linux alternatives?

~~~
piramida
Then again, git is not a consumer software. Developer should spend some time
and learn 5 commands to be productive.

But I find this interface interesting, even knowing all command line git this
makes browsing history for reviews easy, nice tool.

~~~
bruceboughton
The command line is very efficient for _input_ of commands, far more so than
GUIs (though keyboard shortcuts mitigate this). GUIs are far more efficient
for _output_ of infomation though, especially verbose info like history, log
files, etc. It surprises me that die-hard CLIers often fail to recognise this.

~~~
mechanical_fish
And, in fact, my git setup has evolved to rely on magit (an emacs-based git
GUI of sorts) for some operations, and the command line for others, and GitX
for others.

In this case the best tool, even for experts, is a hybrid tool.

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jerome_etienne
"Say, you move a file from one folder to another: in the Terminal you would
have to “git rm” the old path (the file is gone, so no tab-completion) and
“git add” the new path" -- from the homapage. well "git mv" is doing that just
fine...

It doesnt appear to serious on the homepage of a git product :)

<http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-mv.html>

~~~
kree10
That aside, "git rm" (and "svn rm" and "cvs remove" for that matter) all tab-
complete for me even when the "file is gone".

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jarin
If you're a developer: Git is faster to work with and more powerful to use
from the command line if you take maybe 20 minutes to go through a good
tutorial. It took you much longer to learn how to program, and it's worth
taking the time to get good at it.

If you're a designer, writer, etc: Even though it only takes 20 minutes to
learn, if a GUI is what it takes to get you to use version control I guess
that is the lesser of two evils :)

~~~
Maro
That's not true. You can't learn git in 20 minutes or 2 hours, unless you
equate learning git to learning to type simple commands like 'git pull' and
related. But then you're not really learning git, you're just typing generic
VCS commands.

~~~
eru
You can read about the basic architecture and concepts of git in 2 hours. It's
not that complicated.

You may need more than those 2 hours to really digest and understand
everything, and see how it plays out in practise. But after the first 2 hours
you should be ready to use git. (Actually you should be using git, because how
else are you going to learn?)

------
scorpion032
There needs to be a "for human beings" version of everything, because, we are
all, human beings!

~~~
flubba
human after all

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hermanthegerman
The git that everyone would use is to the actual git what the app store is to
apt-get. ;-)

