2011-08-02

(WTF, mac idiocy!) oh yeah, about that "silky smooth OS X style"...

"git gui" and "gitk" are nice GUIs that come with git.  The latter especially is *very* powerful and even Linus uses it when needed.

GitX (http://gitx.frim.nl/) is what folks use on Macs.  Per its website, "GitX is a git GUI made for Mac OS X. It currently features a history viewer much like gitk and a commit GUI like git gui. But then in silky smooth OS X style!"

Nice.  Except, I learn while casually hanging around on #git, that you cannot open two GitX views on the same repo.

And this is not a GitX limitation.  It's damn well not a *Git* limitation, since the tools that GitX claimed to be "much like" don't have that limit.

No... it's apparently an OS X limitation not to allow GitX to open a repo twice.  Apparently a repo is a "document" so it "makes sense" to the poor brain-washed guy who told me this.

Damn... all the trouble Linus goes to avoid the need for locking, with stable objects and NFS-safe renames, and such.

And Mac OS X says "meh!"

Tell me again, why do *developers* use this piece of shit?

9 comments:

offby1 said...

So I've been watching co-workers with Macs use GitX for years. And I'd think "ooh, shiny; gotta try that someday".

So just last week I bought a Mac (don't hate me)! Installed git, works fine. Ran gitk and was impressed by how much nicer it looked than I'm used to (the fonts render more smoothly than on my *nix laptop for some reason). Then I thought: Oh, I gotta try GitX!

So I downloaded and installed it ... played with it for two seconds, and didn't see any particular advantage over gitk.

I'm mostly a command-line guy, but gitk is _essential_.

Unknown said...

To be fair, I only ever double-up gitk by accident - but nothing bad happens when I do it. Moreover, just because I can't think of a reason to do it, doesn't mean there isn't one. So why does the ghost of Steve Jobs think he can prove there isn't?

#offby1: I must admit that gitk is primitive, I've never tried gitx, but tortoise-hg does this kind of work better. "git gui" on the other hand doesn't have any real equivalent in the Hg world (but maybe tortoise-git can compete?)

sitaramc said...

Apparently it's not an OS X limitation but of the OS X document-based app framework.

IOW, software that does not use that API does not suffer from this "feature".

I was also told plain gitk also works fine in OS X.

Vinai said...

I've been using gitk on OS X for years without any problems, multiple views work (of course) just as well as on my debian box.
I never tried GitX and don't feel a need to.
If you don#t like OS X thats fine with me, but jumping to unfounded conclusions is a little embarrassing.

Vinai

sitaramc said...

I'm not embarrassed in the least, considering that the correction is: change "OS X" to "software using the OS X document API when it should not be". A non-Mac user like me can only go by what he hears on the channel.

What would be embarrassing is if I did not correct myself when I found something else (or, worse, blocked your comment!)

As for "don't like Mac OSX", I can only say that "don't like" is a very very mild description of my feelings for Mac. In many ways I consider Apple to be far worse than MS. However that is a debate for another time and place, not this specific blog post.

Delfi Ramirez said...

Mainly beacause the OSX "motto" it is not multi-task oriented.

Do one thing at a time and do it well.

sitaramc said...

then developers at least should not use it.

I dont know any competent developers who would be happy using a system that was defined as "do one thing at a time". If you are such a developer, you should quit and find another line of work.

andxyz said...

I can run two instances of gitk on a single git repo.

It's just a gitx limitation I suppose.

Yawar said...

So far managed to avoid using gitk. Using `git lsd' where `lsd' is defined as:

# ~/.gitconfig:
[alias]
lsd = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all