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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious if you can think of any tools with a well built code review UI?

Our company uses codeapprove.com to get a critique (Google's internal review tool) like experience. It's not all the way there, but miles ahead of GitHub

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

CodeApprove founder here! If you want to chat, my email is in my HN profile.

Thanks!

Based on the screenshots on codeapprove.com it looks similar to gerrit[1]. It also looks like gerrit is used for several google projects (eg. android, chromium), so overall it looks like a potential replacement as well. Are there any features that are in codeapprove.com/critique that aren't in gerrit?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_(software)

I have never used Gerrit, so I can't speak to it directly. My memory from folk who have worked on both seemed to prefer critique, but I am not sure if that's because of the tight integration with other tools like codesearch, linters, etc or something more fundamental to the review tool itself.

Gerrit UX has historically been subpar compared to critique, however it's seen a lot of investment in recent years afaict. A lot of the remaining benefits of critique are largely due to its tight integrations with other Google tools. Critique is fairly malleable so it's possible with enough effort to get a similar experience by integrating with your own tools, but it's definitely something that needs to be staffed to work that well.

I can highly recommend gerrit. It can lack of eye candy, but from UX perspective it's the most effective tool I've tried. Also it forces patch-oriented workflow from a GIT side and you get a nice linear history in the end.

Gerrit was a rewrite/partial opensourcing of previous generation of Google’s code review tool (Mondrian) so imo it’s the closest thing to the real deal.

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