"GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Now
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I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes …

Not my blog, but the author’s experience reminded me of my own frustrations with Microsoft GitHub.

  • spartanatreyu@programming.dev
    0·
    5 months ago

    What specifically do you think is legacy in that comparison? The coloring? The horizontal layout? The whitespace?

    Note: I’ve changed the first link from https://github.com/cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends/network to https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/network. Still the same view, but just a different repo to highlight the problems

    1. It’s in a small non-responsive box
    2. Ridiculous spacing
    • If you want to see the commit messages, you either need to hover over a dot which increases visual scanning durations or you need to go to the commits view which only shows the commits on a single branch
    1. It doesn’t show commit messages
    2. It’s scrolling horizontally
    3. Branches cannot be collapsed
    4. Branches cannot be hidden/ignored
    5. No way to search for commits
    6. No way to select multiple commits
    • Which also means no way to diff any specific commits together
    • And there’s also no way to perform an action over a range of commits
    • And there’s also no way to start a merge/merge-request/pull-request/etc… between two commits
    1. No way to sort by date/topologically
    2. Keyboard controls only moves view instead of selecting commits

    I’ll stop here at 10 reasons (or more if you count the dot points), otherwise I’ll be here all day.

    The network view lays out forks and their branches, not only [local]/[local+1-remote] branches.

    Yes, but the others can do that while still being usable.

    I don’t know what IDE that miro screenshot is from. […]

    It’s gitkraken

    […] But I see it as wasteful and confusing. The author initials are useless and wasteful, picking away focus. The branch labels are far off from the branch heads. […]

    The picture doesn’t do it justice, it’s not a picture, it’s an interactive view.

    You can resize things, show/hide columns, filter values in columns to only show commits with certain info (e.g. Ignore all dependabot commits), etc… Here’s an example video.

    […]The coloring seems confusing.

    You can customise all that if you want.