sjurba

Shit. I had the semi hard problem at my last job and I just realized that the most efficient way I could solve it would be to write a blog post on how proud I was of my (shitty) solution and wait for the snarky commenters to tell me the proper way to do it..

I love this fact about the internet! Thanks guys! Keep it up! Including the snarkyness. It’s part of what makes it great!

(I am aware this is not a novel idea. Posting the wrong solution is better than asking for help.. It is just fun to see it in action)

Yes, I have looked at that, and it is tempting. But you still have to worry about cross compiling and distribution. Right?

Yupp. It's not a complete git gui. Its only used to work on the rebase sequence. Once you finish editing that, git takes over again. You need to use other tools to sort your conflicts, etc. But if you are working on the command line its very nice.

And btw. since writing this app I started committing more often and using interactive rebase a lot more because it become so easy. I would say I use it almost daily.

For me, I agree. I could easily learn vim in the time I wrote this. For others, I disagree. The time to learn my app is 0. Nothing to look up or check. The available keys are right there in front of you. And since they are what you would intuitively expect, you won't forget them. Up and down, shift to select, ctrl to move. f to fixup, s to squash, etc. If you are a avid vim user, yes. You don't need this tool (although it will still save you a few keystrokes), but if you are like most developers who struggles to remember how to exit vim, then you will love this app.

Vim is awesome and my app could never do a fraction of the stuff vim does. But my app can do interactive rebase. And since it is the only thing my app can do, it does it better then vim.

Awesome. I know Vim is super awesome, flexible and very configurable (like emacs). I guess I never got around to learning it properly.. If you compare the time I spent writing this app to the time I would spend configuring and learning Vim, it might make me feel a bit stupid.. But then again, because of github and npm it is so easy to share the work I done, so that so many others don't have to spend that time at all.

Also I tried to make this app to have it do only one thing and do that one thing well. With no config, and no learning how to use it. Arrows to find your line, custom keys to change the action-word. Shift to select multiple lines, Ctrl to move/reorder line(s) and some extra niceties like undo/redo. Of course you can do all that and much more with vim. My point is that it is a strength of the app that it doesn't do anything else. I don't need it to do anything else. It only needs to do interactive rebase.

But of course I don't expect vim and emacs aficionados to take much interest in this app. My core audience are those who have to google 'how to exit vim' every time they venture a rebase. ;)

Yupp. I agree. And writing something cross platform for the terminal kinda sux. I have given some thought to porting it to something else, but am not sure what that would be. Any suggestions? Requirements: a nice language to work with, cross platform, easy to install the executable(s)

Yes, I respect that. I guess I wrote this app for the people who don't use Emacs and/or Vim on a regular basis, but still enjoy using git on the command line, like my self... I might have to check out magit though to see if there are some ideas I could steal. :) Any functionality/workflow in particular that works better with magit?

Well, autosquash is great, and you are right that I don't really make use of it much, but I will now that I'm aware of how nice it is.

That being said, my tool will work nicely with autosquash. All 'fixup!' commits will be reordered and prefixed with fixup just like with the default editor. So you might say that you don't need my tool since autosquash is all you need, but I often use it to do manual reordering, editing and rewording. And in those cases I find it very useful.