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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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GitHub Just Released a New Version of Their Desktop App

πŸ‘‰ GitHub Desktop 2.0 expands to support stashing and rebasing

I'm a fan of this app for some of my workflows, but always felt there was a lot to be desired. So I am definitely happy about this. Alongside VSCode, I expect more and more good tooling around GitHub. I hope that this raises the bar for competitors, rather than just squashing them.

I made a post a little while ago asking for thoughts on how folks generally make use of the interplay between GitHub and their desktop environment. This strikes me as relevant to that general outlook.

Thoughts?

Top comments (17)

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vip3rousmango profile image
Al Romano

Cool.

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fceruti profile image
fceruti

I'm a super fan of Atlasian's SourceTree. I honestly believe you cannot be as productive without a GUI. Having said that, I prefer terminal than a bad GUI and this update doesn't seem enough for me to switch, but hey, keep em coming and maybe one day...

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Nick Taylor

I never really got into the Desktop app. I've been so used to command line now, and for PRs, I review on github.com. Is the main reason to use it to visualize branches or what other benefits does it offer that the website does not?

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ItsASine (Kayla)

I used to use the Desktop app (including Beta builds) but other than cloning projects, it never seemed useful for personal stuff. Maybe if my work was on Github it'd be easier to see the trees and such in the Desktop app, but when basically every project is just a trunk of a single person working, it seemed useless.

I'll probably reinstall it on my personal computer now, but I'll still use GitKracken on my personal and work computers. Enough features to make it useful for professional stuff, easy enough cloning for personal stuff, profile switching, and I had (have?) pro from the Github Student Pack (woo grad school perks)

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Katie Byers • Edited

Just downloaded and tried it. Nothing there seemed better than my current workflow:

  • VSCode for fixing merge conflicts and switching branches (only because my branch names are long and I'm too lazy to type them)
  • Fork for committing only parts of files (useful when I've made changes I want to split into multiple commits)
  • GitHub itself for reviewing PR's
  • command line for everything else
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chuksfestus profile image
Chuks Festus

Hmm that's nice but then there is Gitkraken...

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I agree, but I actually find this app more useful as a thin layer for interfacing with Git_Hub_ more than really my preferred choice as a full-on git client.

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Templar++

GitKraken has it's quirks, but the pro version helps a lot when merging conflicts most of the time. When things get really messy I have Araxis - it was worth every penny I paid for it.

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Joe Hobot

This is the first time I downloaded Github Desktop.

I have no idea why I would use it on top of my editor(s) that do whole lot more than just displaying changes/history and commands/buttons that I use on my editors.

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Gregory

I worked with a specific framework, KONY. And when building a project to see the result, or just pulling last changes from remote rapi, this framework produced tons of unnecessary files and internal stuff. The only tool that helped to understand and easy manage this s... was Git plugin in Android Studio (or any product of Jet Brains) So, if you have smth like that feel free to use it (it is free tool)

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Paul

Full disclosure, I do not know git command line at all. My only exposure to it is only through GitHub and BitBucket. That said, I've been using the GitHub and SourceTree desktop apps for several years, and I have no real complaints. I've built quite a few of my own projects and contributed to quite a few others as well. I've made some stupid mistakes when it comes to contributing, like submitting a PR using the wrong branch, things like that, but I get by.

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Lucas Olivera

I use a lot the Desktop app mainly, mainly because I haven't given enough time to the console. This is good news!