2013/08/14

I still hate GitHub for Windows

I've been trying to use a little GitHub for some time but it's clear that I won't ever be able to think as other developers do.
I just want to do simple things like I used to do previously keeping a local repository of CKEditor and the patches that aren't being added to the main code. Using TortoiseSVN that was a breeze, no need to remember anything, just go to the explorer right click and under the Tortoise everything was available right there. No matter if I didn't touch SVN for months and I forgot everything about CKEditor and SVN, it's just a matter of reading the name of the options and then click Update after finding it. If the changes were too complex then its merge editor showed the problems and I could easily adjust the conflicting code.

Now CKEditor works with GitHub and so many other people also live and die by GitHub that I've been trying to use it, but it's so different that I can't spend the time to forget everything that I know and start over as some of the books on GitHub suggest (hey man, it's so complex to use that you need to study a book in order to understand it and learn that divine "git workflow")

Of course there are two parts here:
Maybe SVN but itself is also ugly and I just enjoyed the easy of use of TortoiseSVN, but the fact is that I've been trying to use the GUI that they provided for windows, so maybe the problem isn't Git by itself and it's just GitHub for Windows.

The first (ugly) surprise is that instead of using the common controls and theme of my windows, it's using that flat look of windows 8 in "modern" mode.
Hint: If I'm using certain version of windows and I'm using a theme (just the classic one, nothing fancy), it might be because I enjoy it and I don't want to use Windows8 even if you pay me.

Everything is flat, there's no real hint about which elements are simple text and which ones are active ones that can be used for something.
The colors are white background, grey text and some highlights; it's sad, no distinctive elements to clearly show the different zones and possibilities that the UI offers.
Or maybe the problem is that so few things are possible, I'm always thinking that I must be doing something wrong because I can't understand how to change things.

Last week I created a repository for a new little project. Sounds easy right?
not so.
It showed up with a lock icon (instead of the book like the other ones) and despite my efforts I haven't managed to make it show the readme.md in local.

And it's better to not talk about the time that it takes to load that fugly UI...

2 comments:

Science said...

You can use TortoiseSVN on Github - I'm not sure what the problem is.. https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-subversion

Kevin W said...

Amen. I hate the Metro look of GitHub. Without a titlebar, I can't even tell if the GitHub window is active.

GitHub, Microsoft Office, and Photoshop are all evil for ditching the Windows theme and creating confusingly different looks.