Johannes Gilger
4.2 KiB
Overview
When you open GitX for the first time, you will be greeted by an open-dialog. In this dialog, you should select the Git
repository you want to open. You can select either a directory containing a .git directory, or a .git directory itself.
After doing this, you will be greeted by the default GitX view, which is the history-view. The history-view consists of
two main parts. The top part is used for displaying commits on branches and the bottom-view displays details about the
selected commit. The window-title will always show you the currently checked-out branch (or indicate a detached HEAD).
The menu contains buttons to switch between history/commit-view, a selector for specifying which branch to show and an
'Add branch' button. Branches can be checked-out and deleted within GitX by right-clicking their colored bubbles the
commit-list.
You can double-click the divider between these areas to collapse the smaller-one or you can use Command-Shift-Up and Command-Shift-Down to do so.
The commit list
On the left side in the commit list you can see the branch lines. These show you how your history has diverged and
merged. As newer commits are on top, two lines joining each other from the bottom is a merge. This way you see which
branches were merged in without any effort.
On some commits, to the right of the branch lines you will find commit labels. These indicate references to these
commits, for example branch heads and remote heads. Green labels indicate local branches. Blue labels indicate
remote branches (it will be in the form of remote/branch). Yellow labels indicate tags. The orange label indicates
the currently checked-out branch.
There are four columns, the first showing the commit subject (which is the top line of your commit message), the second the author name, the third the commit date and the last showing the abbreviated SHA of the commit. You can sort on any of these columns. However, if you sort the branch lines will disappear. Repeatedly clicking the row will revert the ordering and the original order will be restored, including the branch lines.
In the top right you will also find the search bar. Here you can search on subject, author or SHA. If you do this, the branch lines will also disappear.
The detail view
Below the list of commits rests the detail view which shows information about the currently selected commit. The detail
view can switch between three different ways of displaying the commit using the three buttoms at the bottom. The first
tab shows information about the current commit in a nice markup and will probably be the view you use most. In this
mode, you can see a pretty diff of the commit, and information such as the parent SHA and the author's email address.
The view is pretty much self-explanatory but
it does contain some features which might not be obvious. You can right-click the refs and files to get a context-menu.
The "Gist it" buton will upload the current patch to gist.github.com. This will use
your github.user and github.token git-config options if those are set. Otherwise it will create an anonymous gist.
Have a look at the Preferences to set options for Gisting your patches.
The second detailed view will simply show the raw content of the commit, much like git show --pretty=raw would.
The third detailed view is more interesting: It allows you to browse your history in tree-view and export files/trees from certain commits. To do so, select the commit and then simply drag-and-drop the wanted dir/files from the tree to a folder in the Finder. This is also where the Quicklook button in the bottom right comes in: pressing it while selecting a file that can be QuickLooked (an image, for example), will display it in the same way as the Finder's quicklook. GitX even imitates this behaviour by allowing you to press space to quicklook a file.