On 2013-08-14, at 0:59 , Sherwood Richers <[email protected]> wrote:

> I have a few git suggestions, in case anybody doesn't know about them yet. I 
> don't know if this is what you are looking for, but git ships with some gui 
> functionality for displaying the state of repositories/branches.
> 
> "git log --graph" outputs an ascii graph representation of your branch (can 
> use additional options to set what info comes up)

Thanks for the pointers.

I find that the most important part of a GUI is that is is "always there". Once 
you switch to the respective window, the GUI shows a host of state information 
pretty much instantaneously. This helps you catch things that you may otherwise 
miss. The GUI doesn't just show the current branch, or the branch's history, or 
the uncommitted files, or anything in particular -- it shows all of these 
combined, as information that is available at a glance.

That is, the point about a GUI is not that it's graphical, or that it has its 
own window, or that it has buttons. The point is that it runs in the 
background, and always displays the current state of the repository. In an 
ideal world, the GUI would continuously run all possible read-only commands 
that git offers, and display a summary of these. Of course, in practice one has 
to display information in a hierarchical manner, and apply optimizations so 
that this doesn't consume too much CPU time, which is where the implementation 
value of a GUI comes in. 

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <[email protected]>
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/

My email is as private as my paper mail. I therefore support encrypting
and signing email messages. Get my PGP key from http://pgp.mit.edu/.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
Users mailing list
[email protected]
http://cactuscode.org/mailman/listinfo/users

Reply via email to