I wonder how many devs out there are going to basically hand over access to their companies property (private code repos) to this random guy by "signing in with github", without even thinking about what they're doing.
I'm a bit sad to see this cynicism at the top of a Show HN thread. This project is a fun way to browse code history and it's done with an interesting visual style. It's also open source.
I would think someone trying to view a private file is aware that they are signing in via Github to share it. Github Oauth also explicitly states that code access is shared. So, I don't think it detracts from pomber's project.
There was nothing cynical about my comment. So you are sad for no reason.
The privacy implication of handing over access to private code repos to a complete stranger is real, and this project should warn users that this is what they are doing, front and center.
This project could (and arguably should) have been built in such a way that it didn't require you to hand over read access to your private code repos. It could have been built as a browser addon or greasemonkey plugin.
"I would think someone trying to view a private file is aware that they are signing in via Github to share it." - I don't agree. That is why I wrote my comment. I think lots of people would not even consider the implications of what they are doing.
This project doesn't even appear to have a privacy policy or terms and conditions, of any description, so who knows what they're doing with your source code. They could legitimately clone all the private repos that you give them access to, and keep them for statistical analysis or for personal commercial exploitation. Maybe you created a private repo for a NodeJS project but didn't switch the default license specified by NPM from ISC because nobody else should ever have seen the code. Now you've just given your code to a third party with a license that is functionally equivalent to MIT. They can chuck it up in a public github repo and let whoever wants to, use it.
Seems the project is MIT licensed and written in JavaScript so presumably somebody could package it up in a browser extension so there are no privacy issues when viewing private repos: https://github.com/pomber/git-history - He does have browser extensions but they just look like they redirect you to the service.
One suggestion: The long horizontal sliding animation seriously detracts from the user experience. It makes it difficult to track what changed because areas of the code go briefly blank while the next bit of code is sliding in.
Would be a lot less difficult to track changes if new lines of code simply faded in in-place and pushed code around them up and down.
This is super-slick. Suggestion, scroll to the (top) changed line before the change animation to reveal changes in large files that happened out of viewport. Nice work
Been wanting file size info in the file explorer in github for years now, it would make it so much easier to find out where to look first when exploring repos for the first time.
If only GitHub could do this themselves instead of falling over if you try to run blame on any reasonably large repository…wait, hold on, it looks like this website does as well. Aww…
Exactly. I have wanted this on github for so long — even the animation is beyond what I'd like, I'd settle just for a 'prev/next' button that takes you from change to change. I'm pretty close to just coding it myself for local use.
YMMV - I'd like to see highlighting of what's changed, as it's difficult to track multiple changes with the animations. The old stand-by red and green for diffs could work, with the old content eventually fading out or some such - probably a more elegant want to achieve that but hopefully you get the gist.
Within 30 minutes two people want to give you money to run it on private servers.
The entrepreneurial answer to that is:
Write to sales at githistory.xyz, we’ll figure something out.
Just the other day I had a coworker freak out when he saw me do this. It baffles me how a professional developer could use git for years and never read the manual.
This still needs performance improvements - on bigger files with longer history the transitions between commits get choppy, it shows only the newest 10 or so commits and doesn't load older ones, e.g. [0] has around 2500 lines and a history of around 200 commits. Usability is horrible for such files.
Not quite as pretty, but here's a bookmarklet that allows you to go back by one commit in the github.com blame view (e.g. https://github.com/babel/babel/blame/master/packages/babel-c...). It basically finds the most recent 'View blame prior to this commit' link and follows it.
* A "blame" column could be turned on at the left, showing output from "git blame".
* When hovering over a line in the blame column, the main window shows the historical version of the file when the commit was born. Commit message appears on the left (even more left).
* When it is clicked, the timeline jumps there.
I understand it would be a lot of work, but it would be a super valuable tool for browsing file history in git.
What are people's opinions of this type of diff? Are there certain cases where it's more useful to see it like this than the usual green/red above and below style?
Would be great if there were studies on this. What is the easiest to interpret: in-line, above/below, side-by-side, other options I don't know exist
You're right, it's snapshots with the diff animated between them.
A lot of people complaining here about it being difficult to see the diff haven't understood what this is for then. But then, what is it for? Just to look pretty?
Is it to easily find the state of a file at a particular date or commit? But then it'd be hard to do if there were a lot of commits. Would be nice to know what use case the creator had.
I think keeping some color coding for the lines that got added / removed (better for the characters added / removed) would be nice (e.g. just an almost transparent background color on the lines / characters like Github does).
Otherwise great idea and I really like the URL-based projects.
Granted github access, but always get "GitHub API rate limit exceeded for your IP (60 requests per hour)".
This is a free github account, is it normal? Using Chrome Version 72.0.3626.96 (Official Build) (64-bit)
This looks amazing thanks! Is there any chance of a vs code port happening? Turns out I thought my current solution was nice but is actually a janky experience compared to this
The animations are great – but I think you should speed em up a bit. The long ease-out period makes it tough to concentrate on small changes. Will most definitely use this!
coming to github from perforce due to a job change, i have never gotten back to the point i was at with perforce in terms of expertise, flexibility, and custom scripting. some of it is because of size of team changes, but most of it is github missing features and git being, in my opinion, overly complicated. for example, perforce has a very nice file tracking ui that helps navigate changes, braches, renames, etc.
If you try to view a file in a private repo, it asks you to "sign in with github", which presumably gives them access to read your code so that they can show you this UI.
My thoughts exactly. It's nice to see and probably very satisfying for the creator. I can also imagine using this in some circumstances especially during presentations or teaching.
For my daily work, one obvious problem is that I can't see exactly what changed between revision n and n+1. That's what really makes diffs + commit messages useful. With the slick animation, I know where it changed but the information on what exactly was modified is lost and with it, most of the reasons why I use git diff at all.
I like vc-annotate. (Bound to `C-x v g` out of the box for me.)
Besides showing blame-type information for each like, you can also press 'p' and 'n' to go to previous or next commits; you can press 'l' to view the commit message for the last commit on the line you're at; you can press 'd' to show the diff for the line you're at.
