[gldnspud]

While GitUp is a GUI app, and only available for macOS, I think it's worth noting that it has some great undo/redo capabilities built in.

From what I understand, some of them were more feasible to develop because they implemented their own plumbing (GitUpKit), instead of relying on the official git plumbing.

https://gitup.co/

[dilap]

GitUp is such a great app & fantastic UI design, but the author gave up on it at maybe 80% of functionality, and I think for that reason (among perhaps others), it never really caught on. (It's open source and there are still occasional commits, but it doesn't seem to be really actively worked.)

Nevertheless my main daily driver, along w/ the command line. It's undo capabilities, best-in-class visualization of the timeline, and ability to easily visually edit, reworder, and squash commits remain amazing.

(I was disappointed to see newer git clients like Submlime Merge did not take inspiration from GitUp.)

Ultimately I think the future of VC will be something patch-based (pijul?) w/ a UI along the lines of GitUp.

[swisspol]

Hey I didn't gave up on it at 80% functionality ;) It had 100% for my needs and it's been rock stable since then - I still use it daily!

But yes, I wasn't really worth actively maintaining it as it was feature complete and I didn't intend to build a business out of it.

[dilap]

Yes, I also use it daily, so thanks for making an amazing tool!

100% vs 80% is of course going to be subjective, but the missing 20% in my opinion is built-in merging and a built-in repo browser. When I've tried to advocate GitUp to my coworkers, those are the two things that keep them going back to SourceTree or Fork.

(Also, on our (admittedly, pretty large) repos, it's not quite rock-solid; staging can be unusably slow (requiring fallback to the command line), switching to the commit view from the map view can be slow, and making lots of changes to the working tree will crash GitUp.)

Still, a brilliant piece of software, and I am suprised that (1) it didn't find a larger audience and (2) that it wasn't more influential on clients that came after, like Sublime Merge.

[jahnu]

An ex-colleague of mine used to maintain a fork here. Maybe you could encourage him to continue :)

https://github.com/douglashill/GitUp/releases

[skrebbel]

Wow, I'm absolutely blown away, this is what I want a Git UI to be.

But I'm not on Mac, does anyone know of a tool that has a similar design idea behind it that works on Windows or Linux?

[arxanas]

Nice, this is really cool. Similarly, I had to implement extra plumbing on top of Git to make snapshotting possible. I'll update the blog post with a reference.

[swisspol]

GitUp uses libgit2 under the hood. GitUpKit is an Obj-C wrapper I wrote at the time to make it much easier to use.

Unlimited undo / redo is achieved by taking a snapshot of the entire repo before and after any operation (e.g. checking out the repo or creating a branch etc...). The inspiration I had at the time was that is it is trivially cheap to take such snapshots: essentially all you need is a list of all the refs.

Then when you need to undo, you have 3 things: 1 - current state of all the refs in the repo 2 - state of all the refs from the before snapshot 3 - state of all the refs from the after snapshot Compute the delta between 3 -> 2 and apply on top of 1.

The same technique allows to do the Time Machine feature.