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GitHub Just Released a New Version of Their Desktop App

Ben Halpern on June 05, 2019

👉 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 ...
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Al Romano

Cool.

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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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Chuks Festus

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

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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!

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Rick Booth

I use GitHub Desktop purely for checking out changes/history, it feels like it's missing way too many tasks compared to the command line to use it without the CLI. Looks like they've added rebasing stuff recently but can't find anything in the menus to stash changes.

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Gift Egwuenu

I've never really used the Desktop app for my workflow so I'm curious how this will improve the developer experience for those that use the desktop app.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Stashing and rebasing are so key to my workflow. I liked using GitHub Desktop but I was pretty committed to CLI already. Might give it a go again!

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Bradley Collins

It was a life saver when starting out and having to work with Windows.

I mostly use my Mac and command line now, but still bust out the desktop app if I do some quick stuff on my pc.

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Vicente G. Reyes

I never really gave it time to learn how it works. I guess I'll give it a try on the next few days.