Moving and renaming files on GitHub

[geetarista]

https://github.com/blog/1436-moving-and-renaming-files-on-github

[smoyer]

Using the .. to traverse up the directory tree during a move operation is simply beautiful!

[modarts → smoyer]

I was just going to comment on that. Awesome example of a well targeted UX enhancement given the developer audience (this way of traversing a directory obviously wouldn't work for a product developed for terminal-averse users)

[tommoor]

A neat feature, another step towards GitHub becoming the development IDE.

[msoad → tommoor]

Imagine if you get VI keyboard shortcuts for editor...

[bentaber]

Solid use of animated gifs to get the point across.

[benackles → bentaber]

You rarely see an animated gif used for a practical purpose. It's usually followed by hysterical laughter. At least that's usually the intent.

[dfrey]

How does this work? Is each rename a commit? That would really clutter up your history if for example you are trying to rename 10 .cc files to .cpp

[cobychapple → dfrey]

Yes. Each rename (and any updates to content that happen at the same time) is just a new commit on the branch you do the edit on. It should produce identical history to doing the same operation via the command-line :)

[masklinn → cobychapple]

On the command line, I can do multiple renames in a single commit/

[mtodd → masklinn]

If you want to do multiple renames in one commit then the command line is likely the best way.

[buttscicles → mtodd]

Alternatively use this feature and squash them later when you have access to a terminal.

[mineo → buttscicles]

In that case you'd need to either force the next push because squashing rewrites history or use a separate branch to do the renames in the first place.

[dbaupp → cobychapple]

I think dfrey means that you have 10 commits, rather than just one.

[hawkw]

Hooray! Now I can do all my work directly on GitHub.

[habosa]

So now I can just do my work on Github. If Heroku could somehow auto pull and deploy I could approximate a reasonable workflow anywhere I have a browser. This is certainly awesome for hotfixes on the go when you're on some public computer.

[modarts → habosa]

Check out Cloud 9 IDE. I found that I don't even need my high end MBPr to do my development work; and am getting by on my relatively under powered air.

[creativename → modarts]

I second this - I've had great success using just Cloud9 for development and pushing to GitHub/Heroku

[bruth]

This is no good. I respect the UX of this feature, however I don't want new users to learn their git conventions in a browser, this way. I am not sure what GitHub's plan is for taking over the world.. but it would great for new users, if for each of their in-browser actions they provided help text that showed the corresponding CLI command. This reinforces their intent of these kinds of features.

EDIT: That is humorous.. I write the above only to see this: http://try.github.com/. It does not invalidate my argument, but it reinforces GitHub's motivation.

[recursive]

Exciting. One step closer to never having to learn how to use git.

[TazeTSchnitzel → recursive]

Which scares me. If the basic stuff can be done without git, but not the more advanced stuff, and beginners start to not learn git, they'll be hopeless when they need to do some sort of more advanced operation.

[zevyoura → TazeTSchnitzel]

Isn't that already the case in practice? Tons of devs just know git commit/push/pull and can't do much more without research.

[recursive → TazeTSchnitzel]

There are a lot of users that don't need the more advanced stuff.

[joejohnson]

What does this do to the commit history for moved files?

[dunsudu → joejohnson]

I guess it just checks the new file in and removes the old one. Git doesn't track file moves, except a posteriori.