From what I understand, some of them were more feasible to develop because they implemented their own plumbing (GitUpKit), instead of relying on the official git plumbing.
Nevertheless my main daily driver, along w/ the command line. It's undo capabilities, best-in-class visualization of the timeline, and ability to easily visually edit, reworder, and squash commits remain amazing.
(I was disappointed to see newer git clients like Submlime Merge did not take inspiration from GitUp.)
Ultimately I think the future of VC will be something patch-based (pijul?) w/ a UI along the lines of GitUp.
But yes, I wasn't really worth actively maintaining it as it was feature complete and I didn't intend to build a business out of it.
100% vs 80% is of course going to be subjective, but the missing 20% in my opinion is built-in merging and a built-in repo browser. When I've tried to advocate GitUp to my coworkers, those are the two things that keep them going back to SourceTree or Fork.
(Also, on our (admittedly, pretty large) repos, it's not quite rock-solid; staging can be unusably slow (requiring fallback to the command line), switching to the commit view from the map view can be slow, and making lots of changes to the working tree will crash GitUp.)
Still, a brilliant piece of software, and I am suprised that (1) it didn't find a larger audience and (2) that it wasn't more influential on clients that came after, like Sublime Merge.
But I'm not on Mac, does anyone know of a tool that has a similar design idea behind it that works on Windows or Linux?
Unlimited undo / redo is achieved by taking a snapshot of the entire repo before and after any operation (e.g. checking out the repo or creating a branch etc...). The inspiration I had at the time was that is it is trivially cheap to take such snapshots: essentially all you need is a list of all the refs.
Then when you need to undo, you have 3 things: 1 - current state of all the refs in the repo 2 - state of all the refs from the before snapshot 3 - state of all the refs from the after snapshot Compute the delta between 3 -> 2 and apply on top of 1.
The same technique allows to do the Time Machine feature.