Hacker News Reader

Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

There's no market for this sort of thing on Windows. The vast majority of development that happens on Windows takes place in either Visual Studio or Eclipse, and those developers prefer tools that integrate with their IDE rather than be standalone.

View on HN

Maybe I'm odd but apart from working in VS, none of your statements hold true for me. I saw this and was like 'gimme gimme' only to find out it is OSX only. Quite a disappointment, especially given the recent stall (afaik) in SourceTree for Windows development, making me go back to the command line more and more again. I vastly prefer standalone tools for things like git because else I have to learn the builtin tools for each environment seperately. (I do use Git Diff Margin for VS [1] though - in fact it's becoming more and more indispensable to me which actually shows what a great tool it is)

[1] https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/cf49cf30-2ca6...

At my previous workplace I tried to introduce something better for code versioning than tarballs or (more often than not) date suffixed folders. We used windows. CLI was just a total no no. Long story short, I tried bunch of GUI tools/plugins. Most tools were either too simple for anything beyond personal repo or graphical git command/switch selector. Out of everything I tried SmartGit [1] stood out for its power (never had to use shell for about half a year) and still graspable simplicity. IIRC supports custom providers OOB.

[1]: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/

Why exactly do you stick with Windows? Hardware?

Not the person you asked the question of, but I have a few reasons:

1) Hardware - cost is 1/2 Mac hardware, and I can upgrade cheaper as well. For example, my ultralight notebook came with 4GB Ram and a 128GB SSD. For ~$1000 - Mac equivalent was ~$1400 at the time, with no option to match the screen (1080p). Since then, I've upgraded but the SSD and Ram for another $300 - would have cost almost $700 to do the equivalent upgrade on the Mac and it would have been at the time of purchase.

2) I've grown up using Windows, CMD, batch files, etc. I know my way (a little) around the registry, services, etc. I'd have to relearn all of that on the Mac.

3) I hate all the program menus being at the top of the screen. I have a Mac on my desk at work...and it just drives me nuts. I'm sure I'd adapt, but it bugs me.

I could find more, but I've come to admit that I'm just a Windows user. If I need Linux or something, I just install a VM and go to town.

1) Hardware ...

Fair enough, I get this, but I also found that if its your main professional tool, a few hundred either way isn't that big an issue.

2) I've grown up using Windows

I actually found that learning OSX stuff is quite simple if you just see it as a tool as opposed to a hobby.

3) I hate all the program menus being at the top of the screen.

Fair enough, guess that's personal preference.

Seems like you have fairly decent reasons for your choice, but I couldn't go back.

Main reason: I know it properly and hence can get pretty much anything done fast - faster than in the other 2 main OS'es. Although admittedly if I spent more time learning the others I could get things done there as fast or maybe faster as well. Other reasons roughly ordered by priority:

- it has Visual Studio. Sure I can get around using an editor and a Makefile - or XCode if I really must, but nothing so far beats what VS gives me (note: mostly C, C++, C#)

- hardware indeed: decent, all kinds of form factors, not too expensive (though same goes for unix of course)

- legacy reasons: some of the hardware/software I work with only runs on Windows

- for desktop it is actually on par, if not better, then any other alternatives out there

- tried an MBP for 3 years but had a pretty bad experience with overall so turned back to PC harware. Yeah I know a single case is not representative but it was just too much trouble esp. given the money spent on it

A majority of users I develop for are on Windows.

Take a look at P4Merge for doing your merges/diffs - it's a very nice tool for merging. You don't need the entire P4 ecosystem, the merge tool is standalone.

hear hear! I've been using P4Merge for years since it's indeed very nice, also have it set as 'external difftool' in ST. Only disadavantge for me: line ending settings for the merged file are fixed, which is messy if you have repositories from different sources and/or different autocrlf settings

We use git exclusively as a Windows-based shop and only 1 person uses the git integration with Visual Studio. Everyone else uses different solutions from tortoise to source tree to command line.

I think there's definitely a decent market for this sort of thing - I've had plenty of conversations locally that end with "Wow, I'm so glad to get away from Visual Studio for this"

Meh, same here, some are using git bash on top of cmder, some are using Git Gui, some integrated with Eclipse, some integrated with Rstudio.

I completely disagree, that is the kind of thinking that causes OSX only software to be written. I use Windows because that's what I grew up on and as a practical matter, I can buy the same equipment for half the price of a Mac. And I use all maner of "cool tools" like this as much as possible.

Pissing on devs who use Windows may have been somewhat valid a few years ago, but times are changing, and people use it even if they aren't doing VS/Eclipse work. (FWIW, I hate Eclipse. However, Visual Studio is a very good IDE, if you like IDEs)

1. The git integration in visual studio is incomplete (no ssh transport and no log rendering) so you have to complement it with an external tool. 2. Everything in a repo doesn't always belongs to a specific visual studio project.

I do Windows development with Visual Studio, but all my Git commands are done through Git Bash, which I love.

I use standalone SourceTree on windows, even though I develop in Eclipse.

Try GitExtensions. Its an excellent gui for windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com