Comment by jbrooksuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbrooksuk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Firstly, a major congratulations to the gang at GitLab - well deserved!

We'd used GitLab for over a year internally, but as I've mentioned previously, it became a pain to maintain. So we switched to GitHub for our private "important" projects and turned off our GitLab instance (other reasons caused this too mind). Our version was 6.7 or something up until today.

Today we realised we should run GitLab internally again for non-critical repositories - since our networking is a pain to give external access to servers - we can't access it out of the office. I updated us to 7.12 CE and I kind of regret it.

The UI is so complicated now. Whilst there are good features that we like, it's so hard to navigate to where you want to be. I think this is down to the "contextual" sidebar. I really do prefer GitHub's UI for repo administration and usage, which is a shame.

Sure, the colours are nice in GitLab but it's far from functional. My colleagues felt the same way too.

Also (for those at GitLab) your Markdown renderer is still not rendering Markdown correctly in all cases...

Anyway, not to take away from the funding - it's excellent news!

It's very, very difficult to do what GitHub did. They combined a great sense of UX design with an extremely powerful and necessary backend product, and they figured out a way to make money doing it. GitHub's large bank account and horde of developers allows it to quickly take charge of high-stakes situations and come out on top. (This, of course, is not implying that simply throwing money at the problem will solve it...look at Atlassian Stash, a great product but pales in comparison to GitHub) Open-source projects need money and time too, but most of us don't get paid to work on open-source software, so GitLab suffers from the fact that it's no one's job to create it.

Now that GitLab is getting some funding, it will at least level the playing field somewhat.

I'm a product manager for Stash. I'd love to know more about what you find lacking in Stash. We've got a bumper crop of improvements in the works that we think are useful, but the more feedback to guide us, the better.

Stash, in my opinion, is the best git tool out there. Sadly it's sometimes tough to convince people to switch when Github is 'good enough'. Anyway, keep up the good work!

Thanks, very nice of you to say! We like that kind of feedback too :)

Agreed. If you are copying a successful web product you may as well take it to 100% and then try to improve upon it. Making changes just to look like you're not copying it forces your product to be inferior.

Word.

Sad to hear you think our UI is complicated now.

The hierarchy is actually the same, we just moved what was on top - to the side.

That said, it is a work in progress and with every release so far we have made significant changes to the UI to make it easier to work with and continue to do so.

I understand that the contextual sidebar can be confusing. One way I'm thinking we can improve it, is to make it more clear where you are, so that the context is clear from the start. Do you think that would make a difference for you?

We're very happy to hear suggestions for improvements in this area -or even better, receive contributions in the form of pull requests.

I tried contributing a nav change in the past (https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/6287) and it was closed because the CEO doesn't want it like that. That's one, limited example, but with the size of the change required to make the sidebar better, it could end up being a massive waste of time.

Still, I'll be closely watching GitLab and upgrading every few releases.

I understand that it's disappointing if your PR doesn't gets merged.

If you want to do something big, you should consider writing a proposal first in one of our issue trackers or on feedback.gitlab.com.

In the same line, consider just creating a prototype / proposal or MVP of whatever you're building first. There are many people at GitLab happy to help you get rolling and get the PR merged. At the same time, if you're completely off-track, we'll also tell you that.

The best way to not waste time is to communicate before, during and after any effort.

I'm not complaining that my PR wasn't merged :)

Thanks for the link to the pull request. The benefit you stated was "I find this most useful since I can quickly jump back to a namespace, or search etc.". I think that 7.12 allows this by always showing the namespace and search on top. Please let me know if I misunderstand.

Thanks for your remark. I just discussed it with Dmitriy (CTO) to understand what you mean with the "contextual" sidebar. Compared to GitHub we don't see how the contextual part is more confusing. On GitHub the sidebar is to the right instead of to the left, but it is also contextual.

One thing that might be confusing is that our sidebar is separated more from the page content (different color, out of the way). Maybe that is why you expect it to be static instead of contextual?

Edit: Discussing this gave us an idea to improve it, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/1958 for the idea of adding back links to make it more understandable like folder navigation.

The improvements inspired by the comment of jbrooksuk were merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/953

Reply on news.ycombinator.com