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Git: A Designer's Perspective

viget.com

42 pointsbscofield5 comments

I started using Git about six months ago for tracking notes (i usually use TextMate) and have been adding much more things into version control since then.

Even when not saving the data on a remote server, Git allows me to quickly start a repo when required and branch quickly and easily.

Version control provides amazing new possibilities to many kinds of data. Currently I am using Git not only for tracking Python, PHP and HTML/CSS/JavaScript projects, but also notes, papers, sometimes todo lists and pretty much anything text-based.

Tried writing and using a tool that unzips a Word doc and then adds the XML files inside to a Git repo, but the XML history is quite useless.

If Google Wave like Robots are possible in Docs, then would be great to add Git functionality to Google Docs. Or maybe Google will just improve the history views in its apps.

I wish there were more merge extensions in git. For instance, I would very much like an extension that merged bitmap images in a fine-grained manner, such that I could specify if it's okay to merge two sets of changes or just select the latest one on a consistent basis. This would allow multiple devs to do touch-up work on a single large image instead of having to cut it up into pieces.

You can link Git up to use any mergetool you want, if you have a specific one in mind. I've seen it used with Perforce visual merge tool, opendiff, kdiff3, etc. If you have a tool you like, it's not too difficult to get it setup.

See: http://progit.org/book/ch7-1.html#external_merge_and_diff_to...

To be honest, I haven't used branching yet. But from what I hear it's much easier to do in Git, and developers love it.

Branching is in fact one of the best features of git, but it's so powerful and loaded with features that the documentation has become a trial to use.

I think we're in need of some really simple documentation for git, created specifically for visual learners. Even coming from the svn world, it's a bit hard to understand what "decentralized" really means, in terms of usage.

This book is awesome: http://progit.org/book/

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