git-tui considerations

[jtrv]

I am starting this discussion to start community input on the git-tui

Lazygit has seemed to be the most ergonomic of the version control TUI's IME. I think if lazygit has not been considered yet, it might be great inspiration for a 'git-tui'.

Also I think it might be worth looking into a different name for 'git-tui' so as not to be confused with gitui... maybe 'gixui' ?

[Byron]

Just to clear this up a little, the whole topic around git-tui is a bit of a mess. The reason for that is that I don't totally know yet how it should be used. There is another crate, git-tix, which definitely will become a simple 'what I always wanted' tig-like user interface, mostly for viewing git repositories.

git-tui was imagined to be a library crate full of building blocks to create the user interface experience for ein, such that ein can drive typical user journeys with ease. Despite having never used it, I liked the ideas behind magit as it seems to make text actionable. You see it, you can manipulate it, which seems like an efficient approach. The 'typical' TUIs I never really liked and thought there was a lot of room for improvement, so my motivation of studying what's there is mostly to learn which patterns to avoid.

Also I think it might be worth looking into a different name for 'git-tui' so as not to be confused with gitui... maybe 'gixui' ?

That's a fair point, but I don't think it's going to be an issue as it's a library crate. Future user interfaces will be made available through ein directly, and the tix program will be provided via the git-tix crate, hence one won't be able to run cargo install git-tui`.

Judging by my roadmap, I don't think any GUI work will happen this year, or at least it's not planned, and I do wonder when I get to it as using tig or the current git user interfaces isn't exactly my biggest gripe. tix has the highest chance of being hacked together in a weekend though, maybe if tig annoys me enough with its sluggishness in big repositories, it could happen this year.

Besides that, please don't hesitate to drop all of your ideas here, that can't ever hurt.

[kalkin]

@JacobTravers Just a shameless plug: There is also https://github.com/kalkin/git-log-viewer