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67 pointsduartetb41 comments

"Github Desktop, For both Mac and Windows"

lol... I think they're forgetting something.

“Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.”

I'd wager there was a big meeting at Github recently where someone said "Well, we won't be shipping for linux" and someone else was like, "Wait.. what?"

No Linux support? Really?

That seems like an obvious choice. Linux users are going to be cli friendly - an area Git happens to excel at already.

Maybe they are assuming Linux users don't need a gui client? :)

Yes, I've never found a Git client that doesn't result in a second-class experience. For anything common, a CLI is almost always quicker and more consistent. For everything else, I'd much rather quickly search a man page or Stack Overflow for a command than search through likely verbose help documentation for a GUI app.

Visual diff is very useful to me. I use Meld which works really well for now. But I would love to see a terminal based side-by-side diff view. Does tig have that?

> For anything common, a CLI is almost always quicker and more consistent.

I'm also a command line fan, but when it comes to git there are 2 areas where a GUI is nice:

- After slashing through dozens of files, it's nice to have a nice GUI that gives you a list of all changed files, and manually select the lines you want to stage. I use git-cola (https://git-cola.github.io/) or git extensions (https://gitextensions.github.io/, although there's no screenshot of this exact functionality) depending on the platform I'm on

- When I need to explore a repo's history, I like having some interactivity: filtering branches/tags, quickly searching for a commit or its ancestor, search where a commit is included... the git cli is absolutely not the right tool for that.

I could get used to tig (https://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/git-tig/) because it fits the bill for both cases, I just haven taken the time. Sometimes a mouse may be the best tool.

I've had good experiences with magit (Emacs' git interface). Doesn't do much good if you ain't an Emacs user, though.

It really saddens me how many tech companies ignore Linux, especially when they have the resources on hand to build the additional clients.

meh -__-

I'm assuming they're getting rid of all that native code for Windows and Mac and building something new on top of Electron. If so, why there is no Linux distro?!

I'd love to know how many of their users are on Linux, especially when broken down by activity levels.

Yeah building on top of Electron makes sense. As far as Linux goes I'd give it some time. If it's anything like Atom it'll be opened sourced so Linux support can be added (if anything specific even needs to be done). Their primary customers use Windows and Mac OS X so it makes sense to me to target those first.

I guess it doesn't matter that git itself was created for Linux kernel development. Oh well.

Is this to serve as an alternative to Source Tree? I always felt, the old Github apps, were kinda behind Source Tree, feature wise and seemed kinda lackluster.

Just signed up. My git functionality is at a level of "can do all of the basic jank easily but need to Google everything else", which I'm super comfortable with, in all honesty.

The only thing I really want out of a GUI is a visual diff/comparison tool before pushes. Does anyone have any recommendations for something along these lines?

https://mac.github.com/ ?

Sourcetree's not bad.

Source Tree (https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) is great. Good visual layout of your diffs at any given point with the ability to stage/discard/unstage specific lines from within the program.

In my experience Source Tree is good but it happens to have noticeable slowdown and "jank" on both OS X and Windows after a while.

On OS X I've been using Tower to great effect. Unfortunately it's OS X only.

I've found Tower to be very sluggish on a large repository on OS X, where as Source Tree keeps on trucking.

Our repo is 4GB and has about 1 million commits.

Source Tree is the only client on Mac I've found so far that doesn't completely grind to a halt on a repository of this size.

For me, Source Tree is very unusable and doesn't make any sense. Maybe I'm approaching it wrong?

It feels like there wasn't much thought about user stories and ux: every git operation was given a button or menu item. Sort of the MS Word phenomenon. Their screenshot on its home page is overwhelming, just like the design of their apps: a hundred items all vying for your attention.

In contrast, GitHub's app for Mac is immediately useful: it makes the 80/20 of git work easy.

While you're waiting for access to the Desktop preview, check out the current GitHub for Mac (https://mac.github.com/) and GitHub for Windows (https://windows.github.com/). I use GHfM everyday in tandem with CLI, and the basic visual diffing is great.

GitHub for Mac is awesome; I depend on it for my work along with gitsh for certain tasks.

But when installing it on a fresh machine the other day, I couldn't find a link to it from the GitHub site (as a longged in user). I needed to go back out to Google to get the URL. Made me wonder if it's going to be dropped or unsupported.

What's the difference between this and existing GitHub clients?

Nobody knows except the devs; it's not out yet, beta invites will start to be sent out within the next couple of weeks.

Actually I'm sure it's little more than a 'Github 2.0' client for now, a concept, with the details to be fleshed out after user feedback (hence the beta).

I assume that it's using Electron.

Hopefully this client will be less toyish and geared towards more advanced users. The existing client really feels like a one button solution to everything.

The signup form is missing if you have AdBlock enabled.

Edit: Strangely, I have to whitelist the site even though there are no elements blocked.

Shows up for me, Chrome 43 OSX 10.10.1

It shows up also on Firefox 38 Ubuntu 12.04, Adblock Plus 2.6.9.1-signed.

* No GNU/Linux version

* No information whatsoever; not even some screenshots or something

* I suspect this won't be open-sourced

Dead in the water for me, especially if the third point ends up being reality.

Just a way to sign up for news about it. Not the actual news of what it is or does (beyond vague paragraphs).

I'm surprised no one mentioned SmartGitHg, much better than GFW and SourceTree.

It is Java-based and runs on Win, Mac, and Linux http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/

It's also $120 for a commercial license that only includes 1 year worth of upgrades. Anything with the "updates for a year" instead of "updates until the next major release" is off-putting to me.

I dont know about that, I'm using it free for my personal non-commerical use :)

What are the odds it'll be based on Electron?

Lol no support for Linux, it's not April Fools anymore guys...

Electron (Atom) based?!

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