8 ms·

Ungit – Git UI that makes you understand git

243 points by rplnt 13y ago

rplnt 13y ago
Quick video introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkBVAi3oKvo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkBVAi3oKvo Some discussion with the author present on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kqotu/ungit_new_git_ui_that_makes_you_understand_git/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kqotu/ungit_ne...
- fuddle 13y ago
  You should add this or a screenshot to the Github page.
  - hobs 13y ago
    YES! When I realized I had to run it to see what it does, I was immediately turned off. The demo of the thing that is supposed to make things easy should also be easy. Still looks like a pretty cool tool!
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Indeed. Life is short - if there aren't screenshots, I'm not willing to put in the time to find out whether I'm interested or not. As it happens, this is a very nice looking project, which makes the absence of screenshots even more surprising.
  - denysonique 13y ago
    Just submitted a pull request with a screenshot.
- grrowl 13y ago
  I love git on the command line but you definitely need to expose this to people, as it's a really sexy UI with all the animations and all. I almost wish I could see this representation alongside traditional git add/commit/push/pulls
jtagen 13y ago
Crashes like crazy for me. Hopefully report to bugsense will help.
jtagen 13y ago
info: Inception error sending error to bugsense 0=null, status=402, data=[], error=Throttling limit reached. Excellent.
denrober 13y ago
Works for me but almost unusable on anything but the simplest of repositories.
pertinhower 13y ago
Neat. Not vastly different from gitk. Crashes for me after I try the fetch button.
pedalpete 13y ago
I watched the video, and it looks really cool, but the way I was taught to use git was to create a branch, make your changes, commit the changes, then merge back to master, rinse and repeat. Is that not the standard way of using github? How does that look in this scenario? Everything almost always being in a straight line, and the author always working on 'master' makes it a bit confusing to imagine in a real-world scenario (based on my Git usage).
- jlgreco 13y ago
  If I am only working on one thing at the moment, I typically just make a lot of commits on master then rebase them all before publishing them. I only start branching if I'm doing multiple things at once. (And it is pretty easy to move changes to a branch later if you want to start work on something else.)
  - zeppelinnn 13y ago
    I think this is correct for personal projects, but when working with teams it's better to create dev branches especially for major feature/functionality additions. I personally try to stick with separate branches and then merge just to uphold that practice, as well as being able to revert/find your mess-ups quicker.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Feature branches in git most frequently only live on the developers machine, often for only a few hours,(unlike feature branches in centralized version control systems, which are almost always long-lived) so there is no harm in not branching if you're only working on something thing . If it is a feature that multiple people need to work on, or needs to be worked on for more than a few hours, then a separate feature branch is of course the correct thing to do. Branches in git are literally just pointers to commits (write a sha1 object to any file under refs/heads to see what I mean) so they don't really buy you much if you're not frequently switching between locations in the DAG, but can be created retroactively with zero hassle if you do find yourself needing them. Basically, what you do with your private DAG doesn't matter at all, what is important is that you only publish things that are sensible.
norswap 13y ago
From the video, it looks like all changes are automatically staged. Ignoring the staging area is not going help users understand git I think. Otherwise, it looks very very cool.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  Agreed; the ability to commit a subset of the changes in your working directory makes it far easier to make a large number of small, focused, single-change commits. Tools like "git add -p" make that even easier. If you ignore the staging area, you become much more tempted to make several unrelated changes in one commit, rather than untangling them.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    I agree. The git UI has some warts, but the staging area isn't one of them. It's an extremely useful feature, and a true improvement over traditional SCM interfaces. It's nice to see people wanting to improve git's interface, but please, don't just dumb it down....
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    The staging area doesn't really help much with that, though. Too often there are unrelated changes to the same file, which are precisely as inconvenient to split up as those in separate files without a staging area.
    - Mithaldu 13y ago
      The staging area makes it possible to split them up by selectively adding lines to it with `git add -p` or the much superior `git gui`.
    - jdpage 13y ago
      That's exactly what git add -p does, and it's vastly more convenient than when you don't have a staging area.
iaskwhy 13y ago
GitHubg related: FredrikNoren got unlucky with the GitHub generated avatar. Maybe they could provide the users with a way to generate a new one.
- aeontech 13y ago
  What's wrong with his avatar?
  - iaskwhy 13y ago
    It's one of the ways (maybe the most common way) to draw a pixelised middle finger.
- scottksmith95 13y ago
  That is hilarious! He is telling the whole world what he thinks of them.
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  He can upload whatever he wants, so i don't see the issue.
  - iaskwhy 13y ago
    I believe he can only upload a picture to Gravatar which then is used by lots of apps. Even Gmail if I'm not mistaken. So it's either the middle finger or a selected Gravatar everywhere. I still prefer my suggestion.
    - killercup 13y ago
      If you have more than one email address set up in GitHub, you can choose which one's Gravatar to display.
tunesmith 13y ago
The tree graphics are really cool. I'm trying to figure out how that was done - it doesn't look like it's D3.js, which still lacks graphviz-style layout of trees. It looks like it might actually use graphviz behind the scenes, but then I'm not sure how it animates from one tree to the next when it changes.
- xxbondsxx 13y ago
  Most likely a custom algorithm -- I had to make my own for LearnGitBranching since most tree algorithms don't exactly fit the needs of a VCS visualization. Imagine the author did the same, but its all open source
kemist 13y ago
Great work! You're off to a good start. I like the visualization, the intro video, and the easy install. I look forward to seeing it improve.
twodayslate 13y ago
This is awesome. Thanks for sharing. It looks really clean.
jonahx 13y ago
This UI is slick. The whole thing seems well designed. Very nice work!
ivan_ah 13y ago
screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/hovCdWP.png http://i.imgur.com/hovCdWP.png VERY COOL. I love the idea. If you can make somehow easier to use (for non developers) this could be a life saver. Your designer is not expert at git... so you decide to just email each other stuff.... OR.... you show him/her how to use ungit and BAM! they are in your world with no command line invocations required. Could you drop the node.js dependence and wrap the entire UI as a chrome extension? Is there git in the browser? Of course, you would still need some "server" to access the file system...
guynamedloren 13y ago
This is awesome. I'm building a 'github for non-developers' and I think I'm going to fork this and integrate it into my project. One of the goals is to have all of the features and benefits of git but masked behind a clean, intuitive UI. This project fits that goal perfectly. Thank you!
johnnyg 13y ago
Love the concept. The npm install errored out, I got it going via sudo, loaded a large project with it and it crashed. I will be back in a month to have another go. :-)
denysonique 13y ago
It would be nice if you packaged it in node-webkit
jliptzin 13y ago
Cool. Won't replace Tower though, for me at least.
perlgeek 13y ago
I teach introductory git courses at work, and I think I'm going to use ungit to show the commit graph is built, what happens when you leave a comit behind etc.
dz0ny 13y ago
I'am not comfortable using this, because by default he is collecting all debug and analytics data. If he is from Europe he might be also breaking the law(depends on country) by doing this. PR -> https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91 https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91 Edit: added PR
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mjs 13y ago
  Going from the comment in the config file, "debug" data is only collected if the application crashes. Google Analytics is hooked up by default though, which is unusual. (Actually I'm not sure how that's going to work, since everyone's going to be on a different domain name.) https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91/files#L0L16 https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91/files#L0L16
- FredrikNoren 13y ago
  Yup you're absolutely right, this was something I just left from the dev days and didn't think too much about. I've merged the PR.
flog 13y ago
Great. I hate the git CLI and constantly shoot myself in the foot with my ignorance. UX wise I don't know if the drag and drop works 100%. As a suggestion to the author, how about drawing lines instead from the working node to a future node state? 2c
ecuzzillo 13y ago
One of the most common failures of understanding I come across when people first start trying to use git is that there are two dimensions of parallelism: between branches in one repo, and between repos. This can't address that, as I understand it, because it works on one repo at a time.
contingencies 13y ago
I put some of our non-devs on git today for managing a complex and growing set of legal documents. They use SourceTree[1], which is a great GUI that Atlassian bought recently. All they needed to understand was 'add' (to index), 'commit', 'push' and 'pull', which took about 10 minutes to communicate on Skype. [1] http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
shangxiao 13y ago
I personally believe that "tig", a TUI for git, is easier to use than this.
btbuildem 13y ago
Very nice, installing now. Please add the video to the GH page.. I almost meh'd out of there, but was lucky to notice someone's comment here mentioning the youtube vid. EDIT: just tried it.. Dear god, our repo looks like a swarm of drunken spiders was hard at work there.. Also, +1 to the request to change the default config and not track everything!
a5m0 13y ago
How does this compare to gitorius or gitlab?

243 points by rplnt 13y ago

rplnt 13y ago

Quick video introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkBVAi3oKvo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkBVAi3oKvo Some discussion with the author present on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kqotu/ungit_new_git_ui_that_makes_you_understand_git/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kqotu/ungit_ne...

fuddle 13y ago
You should add this or a screenshot to the Github page.
- hobs 13y ago
  YES! When I realized I had to run it to see what it does, I was immediately turned off. The demo of the thing that is supposed to make things easy should also be easy. Still looks like a pretty cool tool!
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Indeed. Life is short - if there aren't screenshots, I'm not willing to put in the time to find out whether I'm interested or not. As it happens, this is a very nice looking project, which makes the absence of screenshots even more surprising.
- denysonique 13y ago
  Just submitted a pull request with a screenshot.
grrowl 13y ago
I love git on the command line but you definitely need to expose this to people, as it's a really sexy UI with all the animations and all. I almost wish I could see this representation alongside traditional git add/commit/push/pulls

jtagen 13y ago

Crashes like crazy for me. Hopefully report to bugsense will help.

jtagen 13y ago

info: Inception error sending error to bugsense 0=null, status=402, data=[], error=Throttling limit reached. Excellent.

denrober 13y ago

Works for me but almost unusable on anything but the simplest of repositories.

pertinhower 13y ago

Neat. Not vastly different from gitk. Crashes for me after I try the fetch button.

pedalpete 13y ago

I watched the video, and it looks really cool, but the way I was taught to use git was to create a branch, make your changes, commit the changes, then merge back to master, rinse and repeat. Is that not the standard way of using github? How does that look in this scenario? Everything almost always being in a straight line, and the author always working on 'master' makes it a bit confusing to imagine in a real-world scenario (based on my Git usage).

jlgreco 13y ago
If I am only working on one thing at the moment, I typically just make a lot of commits on master then rebase them all before publishing them. I only start branching if I'm doing multiple things at once. (And it is pretty easy to move changes to a branch later if you want to start work on something else.)
- zeppelinnn 13y ago
  I think this is correct for personal projects, but when working with teams it's better to create dev branches especially for major feature/functionality additions. I personally try to stick with separate branches and then merge just to uphold that practice, as well as being able to revert/find your mess-ups quicker.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Feature branches in git most frequently only live on the developers machine, often for only a few hours,(unlike feature branches in centralized version control systems, which are almost always long-lived) so there is no harm in not branching if you're only working on something thing . If it is a feature that multiple people need to work on, or needs to be worked on for more than a few hours, then a separate feature branch is of course the correct thing to do. Branches in git are literally just pointers to commits (write a sha1 object to any file under refs/heads to see what I mean) so they don't really buy you much if you're not frequently switching between locations in the DAG, but can be created retroactively with zero hassle if you do find yourself needing them. Basically, what you do with your private DAG doesn't matter at all, what is important is that you only publish things that are sensible.

norswap 13y ago

From the video, it looks like all changes are automatically staged. Ignoring the staging area is not going help users understand git I think. Otherwise, it looks very very cool.

JoshTriplett 13y ago
Agreed; the ability to commit a subset of the changes in your working directory makes it far easier to make a large number of small, focused, single-change commits. Tools like "git add -p" make that even easier. If you ignore the staging area, you become much more tempted to make several unrelated changes in one commit, rather than untangling them.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  I agree. The git UI has some warts, but the staging area isn't one of them. It's an extremely useful feature, and a true improvement over traditional SCM interfaces. It's nice to see people wanting to improve git's interface, but please, don't just dumb it down....
- lucian1900 13y ago
  The staging area doesn't really help much with that, though. Too often there are unrelated changes to the same file, which are precisely as inconvenient to split up as those in separate files without a staging area.
  - Mithaldu 13y ago
    The staging area makes it possible to split them up by selectively adding lines to it with `git add -p` or the much superior `git gui`.
  - jdpage 13y ago
    That's exactly what git add -p does, and it's vastly more convenient than when you don't have a staging area.

iaskwhy 13y ago

GitHubg related: FredrikNoren got unlucky with the GitHub generated avatar. Maybe they could provide the users with a way to generate a new one.

aeontech 13y ago
What's wrong with his avatar?
- iaskwhy 13y ago
  It's one of the ways (maybe the most common way) to draw a pixelised middle finger.
scottksmith95 13y ago
That is hilarious! He is telling the whole world what he thinks of them.
Mithaldu 13y ago
He can upload whatever he wants, so i don't see the issue.
- iaskwhy 13y ago
  I believe he can only upload a picture to Gravatar which then is used by lots of apps. Even Gmail if I'm not mistaken. So it's either the middle finger or a selected Gravatar everywhere. I still prefer my suggestion.
  - killercup 13y ago
    If you have more than one email address set up in GitHub, you can choose which one's Gravatar to display.

tunesmith 13y ago

The tree graphics are really cool. I'm trying to figure out how that was done - it doesn't look like it's D3.js, which still lacks graphviz-style layout of trees. It looks like it might actually use graphviz behind the scenes, but then I'm not sure how it animates from one tree to the next when it changes.

xxbondsxx 13y ago
Most likely a custom algorithm -- I had to make my own for LearnGitBranching since most tree algorithms don't exactly fit the needs of a VCS visualization. Imagine the author did the same, but its all open source

kemist 13y ago

Great work! You're off to a good start. I like the visualization, the intro video, and the easy install. I look forward to seeing it improve.

twodayslate 13y ago

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing. It looks really clean.

jonahx 13y ago

This UI is slick. The whole thing seems well designed. Very nice work!

ivan_ah 13y ago

screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/hovCdWP.png http://i.imgur.com/hovCdWP.png VERY COOL. I love the idea. If you can make somehow easier to use (for non developers) this could be a life saver. Your designer is not expert at git... so you decide to just email each other stuff.... OR.... you show him/her how to use ungit and BAM! they are in your world with no command line invocations required. Could you drop the node.js dependence and wrap the entire UI as a chrome extension? Is there git in the browser? Of course, you would still need some "server" to access the file system...

guynamedloren 13y ago

This is awesome. I'm building a 'github for non-developers' and I think I'm going to fork this and integrate it into my project. One of the goals is to have all of the features and benefits of git but masked behind a clean, intuitive UI. This project fits that goal perfectly. Thank you!

johnnyg 13y ago

Love the concept. The npm install errored out, I got it going via sudo, loaded a large project with it and it crashed. I will be back in a month to have another go. :-)

denysonique 13y ago

It would be nice if you packaged it in node-webkit

jliptzin 13y ago

Cool. Won't replace Tower though, for me at least.

perlgeek 13y ago

I teach introductory git courses at work, and I think I'm going to use ungit to show the commit graph is built, what happens when you leave a comit behind etc.

dz0ny 13y ago

I'am not comfortable using this, because by default he is collecting all debug and analytics data. If he is from Europe he might be also breaking the law(depends on country) by doing this. PR -> https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91 https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91 Edit: added PR

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mjs 13y ago
Going from the comment in the config file, "debug" data is only collected if the application crashes. Google Analytics is hooked up by default though, which is unusual. (Actually I'm not sure how that's going to work, since everyone's going to be on a different domain name.) https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91/files#L0L16 https://github.com/FredrikNoren/ungit/pull/91/files#L0L16
FredrikNoren 13y ago
Yup you're absolutely right, this was something I just left from the dev days and didn't think too much about. I've merged the PR.

flog 13y ago

Great. I hate the git CLI and constantly shoot myself in the foot with my ignorance. UX wise I don't know if the drag and drop works 100%. As a suggestion to the author, how about drawing lines instead from the working node to a future node state? 2c

ecuzzillo 13y ago

One of the most common failures of understanding I come across when people first start trying to use git is that there are two dimensions of parallelism: between branches in one repo, and between repos. This can't address that, as I understand it, because it works on one repo at a time.

contingencies 13y ago

I put some of our non-devs on git today for managing a complex and growing set of legal documents. They use SourceTree[1], which is a great GUI that Atlassian bought recently. All they needed to understand was 'add' (to index), 'commit', 'push' and 'pull', which took about 10 minutes to communicate on Skype. [1] http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

shangxiao 13y ago

I personally believe that "tig", a TUI for git, is easier to use than this.

btbuildem 13y ago

Very nice, installing now. Please add the video to the GH page.. I almost meh'd out of there, but was lucky to notice someone's comment here mentioning the youtube vid. EDIT: just tried it.. Dear god, our repo looks like a swarm of drunken spiders was hard at work there.. Also, +1 to the request to change the default config and not track everything!

a5m0 13y ago

How does this compare to gitorius or gitlab?