Feature requests

Put your ideas below (new ones at the top). Please have a look at the GitXLighthouse-Tracker first to see if your feature hasn’t been requested already.

If you add a feature here under “Open ideas”, please add your name or github username, as the wiki currently lacks any decent history information.

Commonly requested features

• Push/pull/merge – This is not your simple feature-request but rather a fundamental change to GitX, UI-wise as well as design-wise. Rest assured it is on the TODO-list for the future. – [heipei]

• Recently-used-repositories view/start-screen – This is in the TODO as well – [heipei]

Open Ideas

• Support for remotes (e.g. push, fast-forward-pull)

• be able to view the history of a specific blob or tree – this is very useful when I am debugging a merge and need to see how something changed — [danlucraft]

• be able to do `gitx long/path/to/myapp` instead of `cd long/path/to/myapp; gitx` This would make it more like other CLI editor launcher scripts. — [bcarpenter]

• Greater flexibility in diff format: character by character diffs, ignore whitespace diffs and wrap long lines in particular. This will make gitx much more useful for managing plain text (i.e. prose) repositories – (note that http://gitx.lighthouseapp.com/projects/17830/tickets/161-feature-request-make-diff-output-switchable-to-color-words is a part duplicate of this request) [singingfish]

• Add a preference so that GitX shows “All (local) branches” on startup. – Kevin McDonagh
  • Good idea. In the meantime, if you start from Terminal, use “gitx —all” – [heipei]

• Localization (german for example) [Kellertuer]
  • While localization is usually a low-hanging fruit and a good way to get started in a project, I’m opposed to localizing any component of git/GitX. – [heipei]

• Possibility to collapse commits in history view that are neither merge nor branch points so I have a better overview over merge status. Uwe Mesecke

• Show branch and the branch it is tracking.
  • This is a tricky one, since the branch being tracked depends on the remote being pulled from. So you might have a lot of branches being tracked.

• Cmd+f find-in-diff/raw-file [dbr]

• Search for strings added/removed like gitk. [adamfranco]

• Remember file selection for tree view, add back/forward-buttons above it and make it show not just the current file but a diff to the previous version as well. Basically a “git log -p” for any file/dir in the tree. – Phil Huibonhoa and tom hirashima
  • Yes, that is certainly something we do need and high on my wish-list as well – [heipei]

• Store the last 5-10 commit messages so they can easily be reused. – Ben Carpenter (ben @ bencarpenter.org)
  • The question remains whether 5-10 should be stored in general or for each repo (harder) – [heipei]
    • I’m fine with ‘in general.’ I think that is beneficial enough. — Ben Carpenter (ben @ bencarpenter.org) [bcarpenter]

• Font / Font-size preference – Matt Darby

• Show diffs in commit-view with the whole file as context (like calling diff with -U999999…) – drewish

Obsolete

• In Commit View, the option to stage a single line (from the contextual menu), and/or (even better) an equivalent to the git add —interactive option of “s – split the current hunk into smaller hunks” [dbr]
  • Will be in 0.7 – [heipei]

• An option to automatically refresh the view instead of hitting Cmd-R [dlwh]
  • This is being done and should appear in 0.7

• In diff view, show trailing spaces as different colour to background. Otherwise if you remove trailing-whitespace, the diff looks like nothing changed. An option to “show invisible characters” might work too. [dbr]
  • Will be in 0.7 – [heipei]

• Inserting the first N digits of a SHA-1 should get me the matching commit(s) – asymmetric
  • It already does? Try inserting a SHA into the search-box switched to “SHA” – heipei

• A place to easy set the author informations, name and email.
  • This can be done in ~/.gitconfig.

Unrealistic / Not wanted

• In Sequel Pro (formerly Cocoa MySQL) there is a Show/Hide console button (use customize toolbar) in the tool bar in order to see the SQL being generated by the application. This same idea would make a great addition to GitX and would help people like me learn git commands faster. Thanks, Gustavo Delfino.
  • I’m afraid this won’t work with GitX/git. First of all because GitX calls all the plumbing-commands, so not the one’s you would use directly. The second reason is that a few of the things are not simple “commands” in git but rather a series of commands mixed with interactive input by the user.
• Edit any commit from the history view; would rewind to the selected commit and allow you to amend it in the commit view. – Joe
  • I think this would a) be the wrong way to learn about git history b) result in a shitload of related problems. – [heipei]
• Show a full diff of staged changes before allowing the commit (to reduce the number of accidentally commited files)
  • I don’t really like this. If you want to change the commit, just amend it and remove the accidentally commited files. – [Pieter]
• Produce graphs similar to those on github (language pie, impact, punch card)
  • This is a funny gimmick, but is not as useful as all of the other features, which is why I’m hestitant to add it. – [Pieter]