[drej]

For me the main deterrent from Gitea has been their approach to UI design. The shameless inspiration (if you can call it that) they took from Github is pretty startling, the two interfaces look pretty much identical (well, Github has recently redesigned its repo page, but many can remember the old design).

Sure, get inspired, make something similar here or there, but this is an outright copy of the whole product design.

[tpxl]

I just compared Gitea and Gitlab side-by-side and they're very, very similar. So either there's also copying between GitHub and Gitlab, or the design of git lends itself to a very specific interface.

[KronisLV]

> So either there's also copying between GitHub and Gitlab

Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time?

It might make a lot of sense to copy it to at least some degree, instead of reinventing the wheel: if you look at MS Office and something like LibreOffice, you'll notice that both of the spreadsheet apps are rather similar (and you can even enable a ribbon interface in LibreOffice, if you want).

I think the same more or less applies to every piece of software, from how phone OSes look, to how desktop environments look and work, as well as why the majority of websites out there look a bit samey.

[tpxl]

> Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time?

This is what I meant by 'design of git lends itself to a very specific interface'.

Git has branches, commits, merging, rebasing, ... It makes sense for a UI interface over git to show data git itself shows.

I also find little wrong with copying UI elements, where it works. The result is better software all around.

[TheBrokenRail]

For me this is a benefit, GitHub's UI in my opinion is really good and I'm glad I don't have to learn a new one for Gitea.

Whenever I need to report a bug on a GitLab instance, its UI is a big source of friction (especially since GitLab's UI is still annoyingly slow when loading things like issue comments).

[techknowlogick]

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you so much for your comment. Yes, the UI needs an overhaul and that is one thing we hope to improve.