GitHub for Windows 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

GitHub for Windows 2.0

github.com

52 pointsbencevans35 comments

One of our hardware engineers uses Windows, and has been checking in schematics and other documents into a git repo. He's tried switching to Linux, but there are tools that only work on Windows.

I was pretty stunned to see just how Mac centric all attempts at making git usable was these days. I use linux full time and just hadn't been paying attention.

Thankfully github had this git for windows tool! Well, and then we had to install a newer version of the .NET runtime so he could update to an even newer vesion of the .NET runtime just to he could learn a UI that was pretty foreign from the git tool that I was used to.

I'm pretty amazed that we never found a build of git that just worked on powershell or cmd.exe. I've been teaching him with the "gitshell" that github has, but all the bashisms, the weird prompts..

Browsers have made cross platform tooling a ghetto. I'm not sure whether this is good or bad, but it was certainly a recent relevation for me.

Git Shell runs natively on PowerShell and there's an option to make it run on cmd.exe in GitHub for Windows options, does that help?

Github for Windows uses bash by default, but you can just go into the options and change the shell to cmd.exe. Git works fine with either.

The same is true of msysgit, etc. Although it ships with bash, you can just run "git" from the Windows command prompt and it will work just as well.

The default download from http://git-scm.com/downloads for Windows works if you select the right options in the installer.

I've been using posh-git[0] with powershell for some time now and it works pretty well after the initial setup (requires a git for windows download[1]).

[0]:https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git

[1]:http://git-scm.com/downloads

If you want to use the command-line version of git on windows in cmd/powershell, the default installed of git does this. You just need to select the middle option on the wizard page that says something along the lines of:

* Use git bash only

* Put git in my path, so I can use it in powershell

* Completely break all my dependencies by putting a weird version of cygwin in my path

I've only ever used git from Windows. But I've used about four or five different clients. I've been surprised how awkward they all seem. The smoothest experience seems to be SourceTree from my experience. Most of them don't approach the level of polish and smooth experience that TortoiseSVN provided 10 years ago. I'm hoping this new client does better.

I have to agree that SourceTree provides the best Git experience on Windows (I've used quite a few GUIs on Windows, including Github's offering). That said, the weakest part is still the command line interface (but people on Windows are already used to it, or don't know what they're missing).

I agree. This is very sad state of affairs.

At my workplace I'm trying to drum up support for git, but the poor Windows tools are a hindrance.

Git Extensions for Windows is pretty solid

https://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

For Linux, Git Cola is ok for commits and Git DAG is ok for browsing, but Git Extensions is better.

Shouldn't that be "GitHub 2.0 for Windows"?

Probably not, since the name of the application is "GitHub for Windows".

Except I like many others probably clicked on the link expecting to see a fun little hack of someone that had a github app that ran on Windows 2.0 I was curious how they got around the lack of built in networking.

The one thing I don't like about GitHub for Windows (and GitHub in general) is its lack of a graphical view of your branches. I've found that a DAG view is indispensible for understanding the mechanics of branching and merging, and even now that I'm using the command line much more than I used to, I still find I make extensive use of it.

I sometimes wonder if not displaying a DAG view is an attempt to make Git seem more accessible to Subversion and TFS users, who are only used to a linear concept of source history. (Microsoft's Git client in Visual Studio 2013 is another one that does the same thing.) The problem is that it's misleading, because it shows changesets as being related to each other when in actual fact they aren't.

Looks great! Though I don't have high expectations for any desktop Github client to support the hundreds of features and workflows of Git, I mainly use it as a souped-up `git status`.

I would prefer Github to bend a little more money and effort toward mobile. The Github Android app is half-finished and doesn't have the one basic feature that everyone wants from it - notifications.

It would also be nice for the mobile version of the Github site to have basic feature parity with the desktop version. And it would be nice for Gist to have a mobile version, period, or at least unbroken viewport scaling.

I developed the first GitHub client on Android way back in 2009/2010 and called it Hubroid. At one point it was much more complete than the current official app, but the version currently in the Play Store is a rewrite that is less feature-filled than the official client.

I've been planning to pick back work up on it again, especially if there was interest in it.

That's pretty nice. Personally I use Atlassian's SourceTree which provides a nice shell in addition to their GUI and lets me do git the way I do on Mac and Linux. It works with GitHub nicely.

Not to be nit-picky but it's Atlassians SourceTree.

In this context (Github for Windows), it is BitBucket's SourceTree :)

Except SourceTree works fine with both GitHub and BitBucket.

Thanks, I fixed this.

FWIW, GitHub for Windows supports this type of usage as well. It's a great way to get new people a working Git environment on Windows so they can play around with the CLI.

> Two years ago we launched GitHub for Windows as the > easiest way to use Git and GitHub on Windows.

Is this suitable for dealing with git repos in general, or just github ones? I'd like to recommend my client a git thing they can use on Windows, but I'd like it to not be tied to github.

Yes, it works with any git repo. I use it both with Github and Bitbucket.

Looks good and feels much more responsive.

One feature I'd like to see would be interacting with issues instead of having to go to the website. Also, when writing a commit message, it'd be nice to have autocomlete on issue numbers too.

Still no built-in diff tool and conflict merger?

Still unusable with very large repositories.

Misleading title... Definitely read this as a version of GitHub software that works on Windows 2.0 (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0).

Forgot to add the story about playing with windows 2.0 when you were a kid.

What do you call version 2.0 of Github for Windows?

Github 2.0 for Windows

Nope... that reads as version 2 of Github available on windows, which this is clearly not. Github for Windows is the name of the product so its version 2.0 should be called Github for Windows 2.0

I think the more fundamental issue is that, to avoid creating ambiguity, software product names should not include, as their terminal component, the name of another software product.

Not that there is much significant risk of more than momentary confusion with Github for Windows 2.0 (but if it was Github for Windows 8.1, for instance, that would be a problem.)

wow really interesting conundrum, because immediately my eyes read "Windows 2.0" but you are totally right if the version number went after Github it would imply a Github version update was happening.

Geez, just a joke guys

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