[catapart]

On the positive side, I really like that someone else out there understands that git is mostly simple to understand, so long as you can see all of the concepts laid out for you, and that no kind of node-line timeline or branching tree structure is ever going to be a replacement for a graphical layout of all of the git features. For some time, I thought I was going insane because every time I said "working with git sucks; I wish someone would make a decent GUI", people would insist that 'actually, you should try [x,y,z]; they're really good", only to find out that it's the same command-line-headed nonsense that every other git client thinks is UI. The only thing that saved me is when I started to explain to people what I mean, they would go "oh...yeah...I guess that would help? If you didn't know git? Whatever. Seems like a lot of work for nothing."

And...yeah. That's always been my impression of it. That if you know git well enough to build an app that makes it simple for new users, you might not understand why a new user would need it 'simplified' in the first place. So far, I've chalked it up to that being a frustrating but unavoidable outcome.

So all of that is to say, I'm glad someone built something that treats branches like a "thing" I can "mess with", instead of a timeline that I can indirectly affect through various incantations. And seems to understand the utility of (if not the necessity for) obfuscating a lot of 'stash->checkout->unstash'-type silliness, and all of the branch acrobatics you have to go through to do something as simple as "uncommit a change", or "move this commit's changes over to this other branch". This seems, to me, like a very good idea.

On the other hand, what I'm not particularly thrilled about is the apparent ownership this app takes? Not having interoperability with standard git is a non-starter for me. I'm not going to deal with anyone's proprietary "virtual" anything; there's not nearly enough utility that can be supplied in a VCS that would make lock-in seem valuable to me.

And of course, everything that flows from this mindset is just as tainted. If I have to use your app to create the branch that can be visually controlled, then I won't use your app. It has to work with repos I'm already using. If I have to learn additional configuration or introduce any non-standard areas into my codebase that will cause interactions with other packaging systems to break, that's a no-go.

Git is good. Git works. Don't try to be "better than" git. At least not right out of the gate. Figure out how to make an over-the-top git UI and you've got yourself a customer. But I can't figure how anyone could make an 'embedded' git UI (that changes the way I use version control) that would be useful to me, in any way.

[schacon]

There are some good points, but there are things I want in my tooling that git just cant do. We need to keep some external data structures. However, we are as compatible as we can be. We keep the index in a proper state (union of all the head commits on all applied branches) and we write out refs for each branch (to refs/gitbutler so as not to clobber stuff in the normal namespace). You can still do whatever - base worktrees off the branches we write, etc.

[catapart]

Yeah, but if I have work in the virtual branches, how is that represented to git? Does it even exist in my local repo, or not, until it has been "handled"?

And 'handled' brings up another point because I don't even know what to call this intermediate state of existence that isn't a domain of git. When I'm done with a virtual branch do I... commit to it? Collapse it into a real branch? It's new terminology, new concepts, new X to deal with something that COULD have been handled with just git. Messier, sure, but messy is fine, under the hood. So long as the UI treats it the same, who cares how nasty the git had to get?

I'm sure there are things that you simply couldn't have done with pure git. But what I'm less sure of is how useful any of those things are. Let me tell you this: auto branch naming? That's not only not something I would use, but something I would consider an anti-pattern. I never want my utilities doing my work for me. I only want my utilities making my work simple and seamless. It's the focus on unimportant and anti-useful stuff like that which makes me concerned about my experience with the product overall.

Again - very happy that you all have put this together! It's a great implementation for the things you are wanting to do, as far as I can tell. It definitely feels, to me, like you've got a winning product on your hands and that my complaints aren't relevant. I'm just not in your demographic. But if there is any question about "who" you are losing, I can at least give you one point of data to say that I'm averse to any productivity app that doesn't trust me more than the app. And I think your app makes some strong assumptions about what it "needs" and that is a detriment to the end user, no matter how "necessary" it feels.

[schacon]

> Does it even exist in my local repo, or not, until it has been "handled"?

Yes, we write the virtual branch states into your git repository under refs/gitbutler/[branch] so you have them represented as real git references.

There is not a lot of new terminology. You commit to your branches, push them to GitHub, open PRs, track upstream work. It's really just that you can have more than one of them applied to the same working directory at the same time.

> auto branch naming?

This is only done if you have the AI tools turned on and it's often just a placeholder. We basically want you to be able to use anonymous branches - not having to name them to start them. Think of it as a temporary description if you want, you can as easily rename them as name them in the first place. Also, I rather like them, they're often more descriptively correct than I would have done in the first place.

> doesn't trust me more than the app

This isn't our goal. Our goal is to let you delegate things you don't want to do to us in some cases and make cool things a little simpler so that more people can utilize them. But you have to _opt in_ to the AI stuff, it's not the default. Otherwise they're just called "Virtual Branch 1", etc until you rename them.