6 ms·

I absolutely love, and recommend to any new team members, GitX [0] and other similar Git visualizers. It's incredibly valuable to be able to instantly see the M

by btown 6y ago

I absolutely love, and recommend to any new team members, GitX [0] and other similar Git visualizers. It's incredibly valuable to be able to instantly see the Merkle Tree drawn out and say "oh, the reason my current HEAD isn't picking up thing X that I thought I'd merged in, is because thing X isn't visually an ancestor of my HEAD even though temporally it might have happened earlier than my most recent commit." I see newer engineers struggling to memorize "what Git command corresponds to my current situation" all the time, and they're missing the intuition that it's all a very simple graph under the hood. Github, I think, does a disservice by trying to present commits as a linear list - while certainly it's easier to code a linear visualization, it makes people feel like Git is impenetrable magic, when it's anything but. (Full disclosure: my love of visualizations of commit graphs may very much be influenced by the game Fringer [1], which was a formative part of my childhood!) [0] https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAV7IioO_t8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAV7IioO_t8

bromonkey 6y ago
Just an FYI that GitX won't work on an up to date Mac
- klodolph 6y ago
  This is not true. Which version of GitX are you using? There are a number of different forks, and the one I get from “brew cask install rowanj-gitx” works fine on Catalina. It is from 2014, but it’s code-signed and it’s 64-bit. If you are using the older fork from http://gitx.frim.nl/ http://gitx.frim.nl/ then it’s a 32-bit binary from 2009. That version won’t work on current macOS versions, but it will run on my Power Mac.
  - btown 6y ago
    Yep, rowanj is the one that is up to date, but to be fair it is not the first result on Google.
- acdha 6y ago
  Here's the fork which I use: https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ (`brew cask install rowanj-gitx`) The upstream also has some signs of life but I don't believe it has a stable release yet: https://github.com/gitx/gitx https://github.com/gitx/gitx
klodolph 6y ago
Yes, the visualizers are key. My experience is that every team needs approximately one Git guru who can run basic training sessions, dictate the workflow (branching/tagging/etc), and fix things when they go wrong. Otherwise you get stick with a bunch of people memorizing Git commands and creating some unusable history. And while I say “Git”, it’s really the same situation for any VCS, in my experience. I think the underlying problem that a VCS solves is the truly complicated part here.
- bsder 6y ago
  > And while I say “Git”, it’s really the same situation for any VCS, in my experience. Sorry, but no. I have taught CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial to executives, artists and students. They have no problem with the mental model. With git, people with a Master's in CS get screwed up. Having "working", "staging" and "repository" concepts is the problem. Maybe "staging" makes Linus' life easier, but unfortunately git escaped to the common people and "staging" makes life miserable for the 99% of normal use cases.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Subversion is simple to understand because it is simple, and relatively incapable. If you only use git like you would use Subversion, it's simple too. Subversion is much less easy when you have to do something like merging a long-lived branch.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      You conveniently omit the inclusion of mercurial in the list. Mercurial is as powerful as git is--in a few cases, arguably more so (phases make history rewriting safe!)--and yet there is pretty objectively far less confusion for newbies than git has. There's ample evidence that git is unnecessarily complicated for the DVCS model it uses.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Given the number of times I've had to go in and rescue someone using e.g. SVN or Hg, I can't say I've had the same experience. The major problem is that as soon as you have a team of people with the same repo checked out, you have as many branches as you have people. These branches may not have explicit representations in the underlying VCS, but they exist just the same. And so then you're dealing with scary "merge conflicts" for work that people have, from their perspective, already done but can't commit and push out.
divbzero 6y ago
Another quick visualization method built into Git: git log —-graph —-oneline —-decorate # —-graph for the visualization # —-oneline for compact commits # —-decorate for tag and branch refs You can also add: # —-all to include all branches I typically add aliases to ~/.gitconfig to use these options by default.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  TRIED: git log —-graph —-oneline —-decorate GOT: fatal: ambiguous argument '—-graph': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this: 'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Retype the dashes, you've posted something different to GP, em dash en dash, or something, presumably your browser/clipboard/term did something funky when you copied.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    Should be: git log --graph --oneline --decorate
    - divbzero 6y ago
      Thanks for correcting my error. Stupid “smart” dashes on my phone.
StavrosK 6y ago
Does anyone know a good visualizer for Linux? I find that half the time something goes wrong it's because I don't know the state of the graph.
- juped 6y ago
  gitk (comes with Git, part of the Git distribution, your OS packager may have split it out into some package like git-x11)
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  magit in emacs does a fairly good job, git --log --decorate --graph --all I use all the time (aliased everything except --all as gl) Also, tig is a nice standalone implementation of a magit like tool.
- FpUser 6y ago
  https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar Nice, simple and multi-platform.
- Dauros 6y ago
  Gitg. Similar to gitk but with a nicer GTK GUI.
- keshet 6y ago
  GitAhead works for me
chx 6y ago
> I absolutely love, and recommend to any new team members, GitX and other similar Git visualizers. Is there a GUI for git blameall or similar functionality with clickable commits? http://1dan.org/git-blameall/ http://1dan.org/git-blameall/
- koffiezet 6y ago
  You have this in vscode I think...
juped 6y ago
> Github, I think, does a disservice by trying to present commits as a linear list - while certainly it's easier to code a linear visualization, it makes people feel like Git is impenetrable magic, when it's anything but. I feel so alone every time I say this, so thanks. If you give me half an hour (well, I suck at time estimates... a few hours, maybe) with someone, I can fix their thinking about this tool. But I don't have however many hours with the world.
thewebcount 6y ago
I found that the visualizers made it much more difficult to learn git for me. I couldn't make sense of what they were showing. It was just a bunch of lines of wildly different colors that made no sense. (I think part of it was that in most applications and when drawing things on paper, time goes left to right, but the visualizers always draw them top to bottom.)
FpUser 6y ago
I'd rather recommend Guitar. https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar Nice, simple and multi-platform.
saagarjha 6y ago
> I see newer engineers struggling to memorize "what Git command corresponds to my current situation" all the time, and they're missing the intuition that it's all a very simple graph under the hood. The reason I have run into this has almost always been because what I want is “take this commit and move it here” and the command for it is some sort of git frobnicate --cached --preserve-stashed that you look up online. “It’s a graph” is great and takes like thirty seconds to explain but once you get that done with it provides almost no insight in how you’re actually supposed to interact with the porcelain to get that graph in the state you want it to be.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  > “take this commit and move it here” Isn't that just `git cherry-pick $COMMITID`?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    In the simple case, yes. But what if it’s a merge commit? What if there is a conflict and I actually want the result to split into two clean diffs that I’ll specify (so that both compile, of course). What if I want it inserted somewhere in the middle of a branch? What if the branch doesn’t exist yet but I want to do this to a remote branch without having to check out something new locally? What if I want to apply the change but lie about the author? Git is able to do all these things, and I am actually quite pleased that it can support all of these strange workflows. But it still isn’t at all obvious how you’d get these to work if you know the operation to apply a commit was “git cherry-pick”. (I have also noticed that “git rebase” is often a, if not the answer to every “how do I fix my tree” question. But it’s certainly not advertised as such, which is beyond me.)
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      Right, if you want something complicated then it will be complicated, but saying that “take this commit and move it here” is complex is definitely false.
AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
On Ubuntu the older version of gitg is vety easy to read as well. I like Sublime Merge but can’t for the life of me visually 7nderstand anything from the way it displays branches. gitg is wayy easier, particularlytbat it doesn’t mix a bunch of unrelated branches chronologically. Like, i don’t care that there is a stack that branched from here or there, let me just see quickly what THIS branch i’m working on "grows" from.

by btown 6y ago

bromonkey 6y ago

Just an FYI that GitX won't work on an up to date Mac

klodolph 6y ago
This is not true. Which version of GitX are you using? There are a number of different forks, and the one I get from “brew cask install rowanj-gitx” works fine on Catalina. It is from 2014, but it’s code-signed and it’s 64-bit. If you are using the older fork from http://gitx.frim.nl/ http://gitx.frim.nl/ then it’s a 32-bit binary from 2009. That version won’t work on current macOS versions, but it will run on my Power Mac.
- btown 6y ago
  Yep, rowanj is the one that is up to date, but to be fair it is not the first result on Google.
acdha 6y ago
Here's the fork which I use: https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ (`brew cask install rowanj-gitx`) The upstream also has some signs of life but I don't believe it has a stable release yet: https://github.com/gitx/gitx https://github.com/gitx/gitx

klodolph 6y ago

Yes, the visualizers are key. My experience is that every team needs approximately one Git guru who can run basic training sessions, dictate the workflow (branching/tagging/etc), and fix things when they go wrong. Otherwise you get stick with a bunch of people memorizing Git commands and creating some unusable history. And while I say “Git”, it’s really the same situation for any VCS, in my experience. I think the underlying problem that a VCS solves is the truly complicated part here.

bsder 6y ago
> And while I say “Git”, it’s really the same situation for any VCS, in my experience. Sorry, but no. I have taught CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial to executives, artists and students. They have no problem with the mental model. With git, people with a Master's in CS get screwed up. Having "working", "staging" and "repository" concepts is the problem. Maybe "staging" makes Linus' life easier, but unfortunately git escaped to the common people and "staging" makes life miserable for the 99% of normal use cases.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Subversion is simple to understand because it is simple, and relatively incapable. If you only use git like you would use Subversion, it's simple too. Subversion is much less easy when you have to do something like merging a long-lived branch.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    You conveniently omit the inclusion of mercurial in the list. Mercurial is as powerful as git is--in a few cases, arguably more so (phases make history rewriting safe!)--and yet there is pretty objectively far less confusion for newbies than git has. There's ample evidence that git is unnecessarily complicated for the DVCS model it uses.
- klodolph 6y ago
  Given the number of times I've had to go in and rescue someone using e.g. SVN or Hg, I can't say I've had the same experience. The major problem is that as soon as you have a team of people with the same repo checked out, you have as many branches as you have people. These branches may not have explicit representations in the underlying VCS, but they exist just the same. And so then you're dealing with scary "merge conflicts" for work that people have, from their perspective, already done but can't commit and push out.

divbzero 6y ago

Another quick visualization method built into Git: git log —-graph —-oneline —-decorate # —-graph for the visualization # —-oneline for compact commits # —-decorate for tag and branch refs You can also add: # —-all to include all branches I typically add aliases to ~/.gitconfig to use these options by default.

galaxyLogic 6y ago
TRIED: git log —-graph —-oneline —-decorate GOT: fatal: ambiguous argument '—-graph': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this: 'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
- OJFord 6y ago
  Retype the dashes, you've posted something different to GP, em dash en dash, or something, presumably your browser/clipboard/term did something funky when you copied.
- alwillis 6y ago
  Should be: git log --graph --oneline --decorate
  - divbzero 6y ago
    Thanks for correcting my error. Stupid “smart” dashes on my phone.

StavrosK 6y ago

Does anyone know a good visualizer for Linux? I find that half the time something goes wrong it's because I don't know the state of the graph.

juped 6y ago
gitk (comes with Git, part of the Git distribution, your OS packager may have split it out into some package like git-x11)
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
magit in emacs does a fairly good job, git --log --decorate --graph --all I use all the time (aliased everything except --all as gl) Also, tig is a nice standalone implementation of a magit like tool.
FpUser 6y ago
https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar Nice, simple and multi-platform.
Dauros 6y ago
Gitg. Similar to gitk but with a nicer GTK GUI.
keshet 6y ago
GitAhead works for me

chx 6y ago

> I absolutely love, and recommend to any new team members, GitX and other similar Git visualizers. Is there a GUI for git blameall or similar functionality with clickable commits? http://1dan.org/git-blameall/ http://1dan.org/git-blameall/

koffiezet 6y ago
You have this in vscode I think...

juped 6y ago

> Github, I think, does a disservice by trying to present commits as a linear list - while certainly it's easier to code a linear visualization, it makes people feel like Git is impenetrable magic, when it's anything but. I feel so alone every time I say this, so thanks. If you give me half an hour (well, I suck at time estimates... a few hours, maybe) with someone, I can fix their thinking about this tool. But I don't have however many hours with the world.

thewebcount 6y ago

I found that the visualizers made it much more difficult to learn git for me. I couldn't make sense of what they were showing. It was just a bunch of lines of wildly different colors that made no sense. (I think part of it was that in most applications and when drawing things on paper, time goes left to right, but the visualizers always draw them top to bottom.)

FpUser 6y ago

I'd rather recommend Guitar. https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar Nice, simple and multi-platform.

saagarjha 6y ago

> I see newer engineers struggling to memorize "what Git command corresponds to my current situation" all the time, and they're missing the intuition that it's all a very simple graph under the hood. The reason I have run into this has almost always been because what I want is “take this commit and move it here” and the command for it is some sort of git frobnicate --cached --preserve-stashed that you look up online. “It’s a graph” is great and takes like thirty seconds to explain but once you get that done with it provides almost no insight in how you’re actually supposed to interact with the porcelain to get that graph in the state you want it to be.

SahAssar 6y ago
> “take this commit and move it here” Isn't that just `git cherry-pick $COMMITID`?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  In the simple case, yes. But what if it’s a merge commit? What if there is a conflict and I actually want the result to split into two clean diffs that I’ll specify (so that both compile, of course). What if I want it inserted somewhere in the middle of a branch? What if the branch doesn’t exist yet but I want to do this to a remote branch without having to check out something new locally? What if I want to apply the change but lie about the author? Git is able to do all these things, and I am actually quite pleased that it can support all of these strange workflows. But it still isn’t at all obvious how you’d get these to work if you know the operation to apply a commit was “git cherry-pick”. (I have also noticed that “git rebase” is often a, if not the answer to every “how do I fix my tree” question. But it’s certainly not advertised as such, which is beyond me.)
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    Right, if you want something complicated then it will be complicated, but saying that “take this commit and move it here” is complex is definitely false.

AltruisticGapHN 6y ago

On Ubuntu the older version of gitg is vety easy to read as well. I like Sublime Merge but can’t for the life of me visually 7nderstand anything from the way it displays branches. gitg is wayy easier, particularlytbat it doesn’t mix a bunch of unrelated branches chronologically. Like, i don’t care that there is a stack that branched from here or there, let me just see quickly what THIS branch i’m working on "grows" from.