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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity?

I've tried both Bitbucket and GitLab, but their UIs continue to be leagues behind Github. It takes twice as long to do something in them (ex. find and blame a file) than it does with Github.

If they could just get the UI right, I'd migrate in a second. Hosting providers should enforce political opinions (beyond defending free speech).

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When's the last time you looked at GitLab? I've been using it since last February, and the UI improvements have been pretty dramatic.

I agree it's quite good now, and still improving

The 'gogs' project [1] is decent and could use some support.

[1] https://gogs.io/

(not affiliated with gogs, just started toying with it recently)

> Serious question: why can't someone make a good Github replacement that is anywhere near feature parity?

Time and Github executed well at the start giving them experience.

I get the feeling that a company starting out now and doing all of their development and management remotely through the site they are building might have a good chance at catching Github in capability. Getting buy-in from customers is the problem.

I think something like gitlab + diaspora might actually have a chance of gaining some mindshare... at least the intent of diaspora, not the execution.

Maybe using something like keybase as an orchestration layer for gitlab either central and/or decentralized?

You could help gitlab getting better... It's open source.

I have checked Gitlab out in the past, and fully intend to mirror my stuff from Github over to there soon.

How do we know that Gitlab, as an open-source project, can't be infected with the same ideological virus? Should I just start by self-hosting Gitlab so I never have to migrate again?

I realize it was just an example, but in Bitbucket you can hit 'f' on the file view, type part of a filename, select it and hit blame.

I'm a dev attached to the Bitbucket team and we're pretty proud of our design, and always looking for ways to streamline the UX. Are there any other operations that you find cumbersome or unintuitive?

> ex. find and blame a file

If you're in a project in GitLab 8.4, simply press `t` to bring up the fuzzy file finder. On a file, simply press 'Blame'.

Let me know if we could speed this or any other action up further.

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