I wish I could understand the value add of yet another IDE. The whole reason for tech to exist is to improve things around the world, and yet brilliant minds are still spending years building one IDE after another.
"Switching branch and remembering branch names..." is a simple git status. On vim, you can get a file browser on the left by using nerdtree plugin, and to write commit messages on the right side you simply just have another tmux window open for git or other unix commands. Building a new IDE is solving a very marginal problem that could potentially create new problems. Why not spend the same amount of time creating educational videos instead on how to use existing tooling that is already readily available?
Other than this rant, I really like gitlab product (we self host at our coding camp) and deploy tokens is a pretty big value add for us for our CI flow.
Edit: Here's a good usecase for the webIDE:
If you see a typo in a comment, for example, you click the pencil icon on that line, which pops open an editor with your cursor on that line, fix the typo, and can create and submit for review a pull request right there. Less than a minute. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16212234
I'm actually super happy with this feature. I don't actively develop on our product, but I do have small changes every now and then. Typically small bits of polish, but they often require a commit in multiple files. And I'd like to keep those atomic, even if they're put in a merge request afterwards. Now I can do this simply from the web interface. Less friction, more fun, better development :) so sytse, goed werk! :)
I've used it a couple of times now not to develop, but to incorporate review discussions and minor other fixes. But from my perspective the true value is for non developers, or when you're starting with Git. No need to worry about remotes and what you did or didn't sync. Or if the branch is even there and you need to set the upstream. Concepts one need to get now are branches and commits. No cloning, fetching, pulling or pushing. When starting, branches and commits are hard enough.
Than, when the new user is comfortable they can work their way up.
Yep, it is also really nice to contribute to a repo that you didn't work on before and probably won't work on after. No need to wait for a clone anymore. Our mission is everyone can contribute and we hope this will make that even easier.
I agree that as an industry we should spend more time on impactful things. That is why we based our IDE on the awesome Monaco editor of Vs code that was open sourced by Microsoft.
> I wish I could understand the value add of yet another IDE.
I was in the same boat as you, when Atom and VS Code was gaining a lot of popularity. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why GitHub and Microsoft was throwing SO MUCH money at their FREE editor. If you look at the contributors for both Atom and VS Code:
And search for @microsoft.com (use ctrl+f, if you are in windows and search for @microsoft.com), you can see that there are 27 matches. And if you search for @github.com, you can see that there are 41 matches.
This is a lot of expensive developer time for a free editor, but this appears to be the current strategy to gain developer mine share. For me personally, I'm completely happy with just using Vim, but I think my way of thinking is no longer the norm.
What GitLab is doing makes sense, and I think it's a requirement, to ensure they don't find themselves with their pants down. I would have to imagine, Microsoft and GitHub, has enough data to back such a huge commitment and it only makes sense that GitLab follows suit. I also think it's kind of interesting how GitLab is approaching this.
By integrating it into their Git hosting solution (GitLab), they are able to provide a unique workflow for developers, that Microsoft and GitHub, currently cannot. Worst case scenario for GitLab, is they detach the IDE from GitLab. Best case scenario, is they create a competitive edge, by integrating the IDE so tightly with GitLab.
Most of our contributors at my workplace are non-developers making small edits.
The GitHub web editor is good for not having to have a local git setup, but I this looks much better, we have a few issues with the GitHub editor and white space, find replace, etc.
> The whole reason for tech to exist is to improve things around the world
Thats a pretty bold claim. Do you think this is true of all "tech" or just software? Do you think it similarly wasteful when a car manufacturer spends resources building yet-another-car?
> ... yet brilliant minds are still spending years building one IDE after another.
Who do you think _should_ get to decide what brilliant minds should spend their time doing?
The tl;dr seems to be that in certain environments there's a big benefit to having the ability to browse a codebase and make a quick and simple edit without having to deal with the overhead of git.
It's great for readmes. For code, unless ( probably even if ) it has obscenely high quality functional, integration and unit tests it's not great. I've seen people commit, and code reviewers allow, broken code.
"Switching branch and remembering branch names..." is a simple git status. On vim, you can get a file browser on the left by using nerdtree plugin, and to write commit messages on the right side you simply just have another tmux window open for git or other unix commands. Building a new IDE is solving a very marginal problem that could potentially create new problems. Why not spend the same amount of time creating educational videos instead on how to use existing tooling that is already readily available?
Other than this rant, I really like gitlab product (we self host at our coding camp) and deploy tokens is a pretty big value add for us for our CI flow.
Edit: Here's a good usecase for the webIDE:
If you see a typo in a comment, for example, you click the pencil icon on that line, which pops open an editor with your cursor on that line, fix the typo, and can create and submit for review a pull request right there. Less than a minute. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16212234