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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Sublime merge would have been a good suggestion in this scenario. It's UI uses standard git terminology and concepts, so you'd have been sneakily trainig them in the command line whilst they used the UI!

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It was in a very old fashion and regulated working environment where developers and testers aren't allowed to install whatever they want. Software installers can be whitelisted after a review is done. It included things like: licence OSS vs enterprise, support, community, or even more banal things like stars on github. Adding new software to a list could take literally months - like in case of git GUI client. Sublime was frequently requested but managers were responding "you already can install Eclipse and Intellij, you also have Notepad++, you don't need more editors. More editors installed is a security risk to this company!" (some hackers found a way to run VSCode portable edition which didn't offer updates ;)) This was end of discussion.

This is also why there was so so much fuss about git GUI client, there were looking for a golden hammer, a GUI that would do everything and anything.

The git GUI in Intellij and related products is really quite good. The diff view that shows three adjacent panes for conflict resolution (|theirs ->|merge|<-yours|) is so much better than the normal conflict resolution flow (not least because you still get the normal code highlighting in it), and separate checkboxes for each changed section of the diff makes it so easy to chunk large changes into logical commits. I wish they offered it as a standalone product.

What was their justification for being like that?

Sometimes I read these things and end up saying to myself "Wow, that company just literally hates being productive"

>What was their justification for being like that?

The more tools people are allowed to install and use, the less standardised software development. Meanwhile we didn't even have common source code formatting pattern and single Java class could be formatted with tabs, 2 spaces and 4 spaces.

Not necessarily. On my team at work we have people using Sublime Text, VS Code and vim, but all 3 (+ our CI) plug into ESLint and TypeScript for ensuring style coherence.

Why don't you encourage people to use their linters of choice? Why expect everyone to use ESLint?

If you want style coherence, the same linter with the same options makes sense. “Use your preferred linter” won't produce style coherence.

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