1 Gitbox

I’m a developer of Gitbox – a mac app for Git which makes core concepts easy to understand and work with. In particular, I’m fixing two usability issues: branches and the stage.

Many people do not create additional branches because of a fear: command-line interface does not make it easy to understand where you are. Also, many do not understand what the stage (index) is and why you should “git add” before committing the stuff.

To fix these issues, Gitbox has very simple branch controls which let you always see what branch you are on and where will it push: just two popup lists for the local and remote branches and simple pull/push button in the middle.

The stage is represented by a list of changes with checkboxes showing the staged status. Also, if you simply select some changes and hit the “Commit” button, the selected changes are added to the stage automatically.

Also, instead of showing incomprehensible trees of branches, it shows a difference between currently selected branches right in the history log (local vs. remote or local vs. other local).

Check it out on http://gitboxapp.com/

posted at 08:35 am on November 2, 2010 by oleganza

2 Easiest way to install Git on OS X

The article fails to mention this, but the easiest way to install and update Git on OS X is by using homebrew. It only takes one command to install homebrew; after that, just enter `brew install git` to install Git.

After that, you can update Git to the latest version at any time, just by entering `brew update git`.

posted at 11:45 am on November 2, 2010 by mathiasbynens

3 Double add what?

What’s meant by needing to add a new file twice? In the example below, I add a new file just once and it works fine.

pre. ~/test-repo|master$ touch blah ~/test-repo|master$ git status # On branch master # Untracked files: # (use “git add <file>…” to include in what will be committed) # # blah nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use “git add” to track) ~/test-repo|master$ git add blah ~/test-repo|master$ git commit -m ‘Add blah’ [master f477efd] Add blah 0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 blah ~/test-repo|master$ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean)

posted at 01:30 pm on November 2, 2010 by marcel

4 Another Excellent Git Book

Just a recommendation for those inspired by this article: Travis Swicegood’s Pragmatic Version Control Using Git is a thorough practical and conceptual treatment of Git. His follow-along-at-home examples are actually based on a simple website and therefore readily accessible to a web designer/developer audience. He also spends an entire chapter covering the use of Git in shops that already have SVN in place for version control.

posted at 02:29 pm on November 2, 2010 by karlstolley

6 OMG YOU KILLED HOT PINK!

How dare you! :)

Awesome writeup, Al.

It’s also worth pointing out that you can actually fork, edit code, and do a pull request without ever touching a command line.

The instructions are here
How to submit a fix to jQuery UI – The Easy Way
but basically you have to realize there is a little `Edit` link in the corner of the file view on Github.

Magic. :)

posted at 04:50 pm on November 2, 2010 by paul irish

7 So good

Very nice post; detailed. I found it perfect. But could you enlighten me please :
Is Git more interesting than SVN, if so for what kind of project?

posted at 06:53 am on November 3, 2010 by Référencement

8 Git or... (too many vcs's out there?)

In the last year I’ve been using Bazaar to manage html, css and js. Bazaar is a non-centralised VCS developed by Canonical and used in the development of Ubuntu.

I agree with Linus Torvalds that a distributed revision control has huge advantages over a centralised revision control. The problem is that there are too many popular distributed vcs’s out there. If you join a new team and start a new project, everybody will want to use the tools they are familiar with and in the end you might have to learn a new tool.

I know projects that use Git, but also Bazaar and Mercurial. And there are others… And on the centralised side you have Subversion, CVS…

Compared with Bazaar, the concepts behind git are more complex and it takes longer to learn how to use git than Bazaar. Bazaar can also be used as a centralised VCS.

posted at 07:47 am on November 3, 2010 by Osvaldo

9 Trying to get started with Git

In theory Git looks like everything we want. We are stugging to impliment it though – we get mysterious error messages when trying to init git on a new machine (windows) or trying to merge. Finding a clear simple guide is difficult and the git UI seems suspect. We are trying to figuer out whats wrong, but lack of a centralised forum is not helping. We have yet to find a good forum. We’d even be happy to host one.

posted at 11:46 am on November 3, 2010 by sad developer

10 Git is the way

@Osvaldo: There are a lot of DVCSs at the moment, but I think it’s clear that git is in the lead, so I think it’s an easy choice to make as far as deciding which to invest in. And git can be used like a centralised VCS if you wish – after all, look at github.

@sad developer: As far as I’m concerned, either msysgit or Cygwin are the way to go with git on Windows. msysgit is very straightforward to install, but Cygwin gives you all the other Unix tools should you decide to go further down the Unix/Linux rabbit hole.

posted at 12:07 pm on November 3, 2010 by skilldrick