GitLab contributors, please take note.
Fossil's UI is very fast and the navigation is intuitive and discoverable.
I know it's on the roadmap, but it is so often an afterthought.
Fossil's UI is very fast and the navigation is intuitive and discoverable.
I know it's on the roadmap, but it is so often an afterthought.
I've clicked around in the UI of Fossil. It indeed is very fast. About the navigation:
1. Fossil has home, GitLab has a hamburger menu with different top level view, Fossil doesn't seem to account for multiple project but I'm probably overlooking something.
2. Fossil timeline seems similar to GitLab Activity https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/activity
3. Fossil code seems similar to GitLab Repository https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/tree/master
4. Fossil docs seems similar to GitLab help https://gitlab.com/help (in this case, for other projects I think it has the documentation of the project, not sure what standard they use)
5. Fossil branches are in the GitLab repo view
6. Fossil tickets are similar to the GitLab issues view
7. Fossil wiki is similar to GitLab wiki
8. Fossil includes a download tab, in GitLab that would be the tags view https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/tags to download the repo (not sure if this is always to download Fossil or the specific project)
9. The Fossil "More..." link looks like a sitemap.
What would you change in GitLab to make it more discoverable?
This is admittedly a lot better in Gitlab today that it used to be. When I started, I literally could not figure out basic things like how to get to a specific repository inside of an organization. It also doesn't help that Gitlab has chosen to use its own jargon for each of the basic concepts. A "project" is a "repository" and a "group" is an "organization", etc. I can kind of grok it, but I sometimes do a double take when something isn't where I expect.
For example: In my mental model, "project" == "repository". But when I go to a project home page like say [1], I don't see a code browser or commit list, or options that obviously take me to either of those. Instead, I have to click the "Repository" tab first. (It turns out that tabs can have second-level tabs, which means those options are hidden initially and thus not discoverable.) But I thought a "project" was a "repository"?
I fully realize the Gitlab notion of "project" may be more general than just a "repository", but this is an example of the sort of cognitive dissonance that I get navigating around the site.
At this point I've mostly made peace with the Gitlab interface, so it's a bit hard for me to pull up examples like this now. And as I said above, the interface has improved. But when I first started using Gitlab, there were a lot of things like this (little points of cognitive dissonance) which made it seriously an uphill battle to even use the product.
In GitLab people can have a project without a repository, for example with just a wiki or an issue tracker. For that reason we use different words for it.
Single people also use GitLab as a single tenant we prefer to use the word group over organization. That will also fit better when we introduce nested groups in GitLab 9.0 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772
Good point about showing files by default, we're discussing that in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26834
Thanks for using GitLab!
As eslaught pointed out, it's not about the obvious mistakes.
Unfortunately, the navigation is very fragmented. There's a left menu, which should be the primary one, but it changes all the time depending on the context.
The top menu is very inconsistent, presented in multiple layers, with different styles for each level, using very low contrast text with no other visual aid. There are no dropdowns or other ways to get to frequented pages faster. Being aligned to center also prevents me from memorizing the UI spatially (YMMV).
And there's also the issue with minimalistic buttons acting like links.
It is my humble opinion that rewriting the frontend in Vue will not, by itself, alleviate the matter; however, fixing this part of the UX will make GitHub and Atlassian really run for their money.
To join the discussion see: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26348#note_23... or https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18844#note_23...
Also handy is the Fossil timeline includes more than just commits, it includes Commits, Wiki changes, Change artifacts, Technotes, and ticket creation/updates so you can get a sense of how things happened in time.
Also, Fossil supports serving multiple repositories -- it's just a matter of how you start it, but since it's all integrated there's not a lot of reason to use that functionality usually. ChiselApp uses Flint ( https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/flint/ ) to handle the administrative task of creating repositories, taking in repositories as uploads, resetting repository passwords if you have access to the ChiselApp dashboard, and performing scheduled pulls.