This week we invited our friend Mat Ryer to join us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that’s been on our radar. You may know Mat from Go Time and also Grafana’s Big Tent, which we help to produce. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It’s good fun.

This Python-based tool scans through your git log and generates a heat map like the one below from the cpython repo, which highlights the files that Guido van Rossum changed the most.

If you’re better with words than you are with shapes, this git guide by Zach Musgrave may help you get out of the “I memorized N git commands but I have no idea how any of this works” phase.

Here’s how Zach describes it:

The git commit graph and its relationship to common git workflows explained using simple English and easy to understand diagrams. Also some jokes.

Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in git, with bridges

I love the idea of having your bug repo right there inside your code repo. The terminal UI is a nice touch!

An interesting idea from Gustav Westling…

One of the things that I like to do in my projects, is to make the git history as linear as possible.

Usually this means to rebase commits onto the main branch, but it can also mean to only allow merges in one direction, from feature branches into main, never the other way around. It kind of depends on the project.

Today I’m taking this one step further, and I’m introducing a new concept: extremely linear git history.

With our extremely linear history, the first commit in a repo hash a hash that starts with 0000000, the second commit is 0000001, the third is 0000002, and so on!

How he accomplishes this is perhaps even more interesting (and hacky!)

I recently discovered an awesome tool called Coolify that calls itself an open-source Netlify or Heroku alternative that can be self-hosted. Gave it a whirl for my own personal projects and loved it, so I thought I’d share.

This is a solid primer on git rebase and the many ways it’s useful.

In Git, a rebase is a very versatile and useful tool to rework commits. Use it to achieve a workflow with high-quality changes proposed in high-quality commits and merge requests. It makes your developers and reviewers more efficient. Code reviews and debugging also become easier and more effective.

Here’s the motivation behind this Rust-based TUI:

I do most of my git work in a terminal but I frequently found myself using git GUIs for some use-cases like: index, commit, diff, stash, blame and log.

Unfortunately popular git GUIs all fail on giant repositories or become unresponsive and unusable.

GitUI provides you with the user experience and comfort of a git GUI but right in your terminal while being portable, fast, free and open source.

This nifty little web app lets you tour the history of a file on GitHub. The coolest part about it is that you don’t have to download or install anything! Just change the github.com part of the URL with github.githistory.xyz and you’re in action!

KBall and Juri dive deep into monorepos, their benefits and gotchas, and how Nx helps you improve the performance and maintainability of a monorepo setup.

Ben Congdon explains why he’s enthusiastic about stacked PRs (and how they differ from stacked commits). We discussed many of these benefits in our conversation with the Graphite guys, but that’s just one way of going about the practice. Ben also lists out a few helpers tools for going about it.

Simply run git log --full-history --date=short --pretty=format:"%ad,%an" > gitlog.csv and upload the resulting file. Here’s what changelog.com’s looks like (10+ commits only to keep it tight) 👇

This week we’re peeking into the future again — this time we’re looking at the future of modern code review and workflows around pull requests. Jerod and Adam were joined by two of the co-founders of Graphite — Tomas Reimers and Greg Foster.

Graphite is an open-source CLI and code review dashboard built for engineers who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster. We cover all the details – how they got started, how this product emerged from another idea they were working on, the state of adoption, why stacking changes is the way of the future, how it’s just Git under the hood, and what they’re doing with the $20M in funding they just got from a16z.

Provides interactive git add, git log (👀 below), git diff, and a bunch more. Powered by fzf

HUBFS is a file system for GitHub and Git. Git repositories and their contents are represented as regular directories and files and are accessible by any application, without the application having any knowledge that it is really accessing a remote Git repository. The repositories are writable and allow editing files and running build operations.

So if you hubfs mnt (on macOS/Linux), it will set up a file hierarchy inside /mnt that follows this pattern: / owner / repository / ref / path. Cool idea! It is affected by GitHub’s API rate limiting and I’m not sure if/how it syncs (commits) back to the remote repos…

Jujutsu (jj at your CLI) combines features from popular distributed version controls systems (Git, Mercurial, Darcs) with features not found in any of them, such as:

• working-copy-as-commit
• undo functionality
• automatic rebase
• safe replication via rsync/Dropbox/etc

And since it’s Git-compatible, adoption should be a breeze.

Jujutsu has two backends. One of them is a Git backend (the other is a native one). This lets you use Jujutsu as an alternative interface to Git. The commits you create will look like regular Git commits. You can always switch back to Git.

I’ve often wondered what will come next after Git. I’m not saying this is that thing, but it’s cool to see people working on the problem.

This week we’re joined by Annie Sexton, UX Engineer at Render, to talk about her blog post titled Git Organized: A Better Git Flow that made the internet explode when she suggested using reset instead of rebase for a better git flow. On this show we talk about the git flow she suggests and why, how this flow works for her when she’s hacking on the Render codebase (and when she uses it), the good and the bad of Git, and we also talked about the cognitive load of Git commits as you work.

This is just one of Charm’s various open source CLI projects.

Imagine this: you’ve been paged to investigate a production incident, and after some digging, you identify the commit with the breaking code. You decide to revert the change:

git revert 1a2b3c

Unfortunately, in doing so, a new bug is introduced! As it turns out, hidden in that old “broken” commit was some code that another part of the app depended upon, and when you reverted those lines, it left the site once again in a broken state. 🙃 Oh dear.

How can situations like this be avoided? To answer this question, we first need to examine how these types of commits come to be.

If you’ve never heard of or used git reset… this article is a must-read.

If you ever get into an “oh snap!” situation where you think you just lost days of work, checkout a dura branch and recover.

Without dura, you use Ctrl-Z in your editor to get back to a good state. That’s so 2021. Computers crash and Ctrl-Z only works on files independently. Dura snapshots changes across the entire repository as-you-go, so you can revert to “4 hours ago” instead of “hit Ctrl-Z like 40 times or whatever”. Finally, some sanity.

This sounds a lot like how Fossil works out of the box, except maybe even more paranoid because Fossil will propagate every commit whereas Dura propagates all changes even before they’re committed.

Eric Gregory asks (and answers) himself a question on The New Stack:

For years now, blogs, webinars and white papers have opined that GitOps is the Next Big Thing, yet here a respected voice in the field is saying to tread carefully. So what gives? Do we need to pump the brakes? Is GitOps just a lot of unwarranted hype? Or is there a missing piece of the puzzle here? As in so many things, the answer is: It’s complicated. GitOps can be transformative for some teams, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

This essay from Mary Rose Cook explains how Git works. Who should read this? Anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Git.

The essay assumes you understand Git well enough to use it to version control your projects. It focuses on the graph structure that underpins Git and the way the properties of this graph dictate Git’s behavior. Looking at fundamentals, you build your mental model on the truth rather than on hypotheses constructed from evidence gathered while experimenting with the API. This truer model gives you a better understanding of what Git has done, what it is doing, and what it will do.

(If you’d rather absorb the same information as a talk, you can watch this video instead.)

How much faster is it? See Timing. If the branch is currently checked out, then 10x is a reasonable estimate. If the branch is not checked out, then it’s even faster.

Is performance the only added feature? git move also offers several other quality-of-life improvements over git rebase. For example, it can move entire subtrees, not just branches. See the git move documentation for more information.

git move is part of the git-branchless suite. Cool stuff.

git-cliff can generate changelog files from the Git history by utilizing conventional commits as well as regex-powered custom parsers. The changelog template can be customized with a configuration file to match the desired format.