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Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

First, it is not a browser. You actually do commits, merges and manipulate branches.

The size is that big because Gitbox is bundled with official Git binaries so you don't have to install anything else. I will see how to bring the size down in the next versions. Anyway, this fact does not affect the performance and does not eat much memory.

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git-osx-installer package takes 4.3MB, but your git.bundle takes 150MB.

The problem is that the bundle contains exactly same binary 104 times (git, git-add, git-apply, etc. are identical files, 1.3MB each). These should be symlinks.

It might be ZIP's fault (doesn't support symlinks AFAIK). I distribute my apps as tar.bz2, and nobody complained yet.

ZIP on OS X supports symlinks.

I couldn't get it store hardlinks properly (using ditto). Do you know how to fix that?

is there a reason you can't write a script to make the links rather than zipping it up?

corprew: the situation with hardlinks and the app size will improve over time. I just had a lot of more important things to do.

(sorry, cannot reply to you directly: no reply link)

Is he really shelling out for every git operation, or are those binaries just extra roughage for technical users?

Thanks for the reply - I'm always suspicious of large binaries with OSX!

so is that better than gitx?

Gitbox is better because it is a pleasure to use. There are tons of little details which matter in a daily work. For instance, when you switch a branch and try to commit to it, the branch name will be highlighted to remind you that the branch was switched since last commit. If you forgot to switch back, you just cancel the prompt. This little thing instantly eliminates 50% of use cases for "git reset --hard" or "git cherry pick" and makes you happier. Also, Gitbox fetches remote commits automatically so see that you have to pull something: this eliminates unnecessary merge commits.

I'll be sure to give it a thorough testing. Thanks for your work.

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