Blamer.el: A Git blame plugin for Emacs inspired by VS Code’s GitLens plugin

Sorry, I beg to differ. I think GitLens is hands down the most useful VCS plugin I've ever used in an editor. Every single day, I find myself reading a line or two of code and wondering who added / changed that line and why.

Of course, it's not perfect, but it's a pretty damn neat hack!

EDIT: As a secondary effect, it also gives me a reason to ask team members to write better commit messages: "Hey, I was just browsing through the code, and landed on this commit, but the message does not tell me why the change was introduced." That happens more often than it did before I started using GitLens.

I usually find the time stamp and commit message more useful than who made the change. They provide useful context, almost like a comment, and for example if I'm trying to locate a regression I can immediately see "did this line even change in the past week? no? that must not be it then" And move on

The way I see it, contextual UIs are nice when they surface useful information; otherwise, they're just noise. Showing blame lines in "prime real estate" for contextual info? I'd personally call this noise. Usually, when I want to see which commits touched what, I want this info over a larger block of code.

I also found that commit header line is near-useless information[0] - it's too short to convey anything interesting. In my experience, almost all commits tend to belong to one of two categories:

1. The whole commit message is in the header line. Meaning the whole commit message is worthless anyway, and I'll have to skim the diff to learn anything.

2. There is a proper, multi-line commit message. That still means the header line alone is of limited utility.

Myself, I use Magit's blame functionality, which pops up a buffer annotating the whole file with blame information, grouping lines belonging to the same commit. That said, I still have fond memories for IntelliJ's blame, which put that data in a fixed-width column on the margin, showing author and date. It also colored the sidebar by commit age[1], which provides something much more useful in terms of contextual data: a qualitative indicator of age of pieces of code in the file. This kind of data is what contextual UIs are best for - data you mostly want to keep in corner of your eye, to get a feel about things.

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[0] - I still like it displayed, though: it's easier to use as "visual hash" than date, author or commit hash.

[1] - I'm 90% sure this coloring was in IntelliJ, but I might have seen this in a different IDE.

Yeah, I think people differ a lot over this. E.g. there are lots of people who seem to want as much info in their shell prompts as possible, and all sort of system resources monitors on display all the time. I'm not an extremist on this -- not having current dir, current branch and an indicator of unstaged changes in my shell prompt would make me uncomfortable -- but I share your suspicion that there's an inverse correlation between wanting unnecessary context on view and experience/skill as a software engineer.

The difference is that the blame is shown all the time. magit’s blame has to be activated (magit-blame) and the buffer is read-only in the Magit-Blame minor mode.

Personally I find the feature distracting and turn it off (gitlens.currentLine.enabled set to false).

Of course, GitLens also has a separate blame mode.

Love to see it's still being used!