[OT] GitHub now supports viewing diffs in split mode

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/5/2014 2:41 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 04/09/14 23:46, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> It sounds great, but TBH I'm a little disappointed with it: Without
>> horizontal scrolling, it's still a huge step backwards from a dedicated
>> native diff program like Beyond Compare and such. At least they're
>> improving though.
>
> Gitlab has had split view for diffs as long as I've been using it,
> including horizontal scroll.
>

Hmm, checking out the demo server, that side-by-side diff still doesn't 
really compare to the non-HTML ones I've used. On the real ones, the 
horizontal scrollbar is never hidden below the bottom of the window, all 
the way down at the bottom of the diffed files, like this one is. And 
the horizontal sizes and positions are normally kept pretty much in 
sync, unlike these HTML versions.

See this:
http://meldmerge.org/images/meld-filediff-full.png

That's how it should work, and how every real GUI diff tool I've used 
works. And it's done that way for good reason. The horizontal scroll bar 
is always right there. And scrolling it will scroll both together, 
instead of awkwardly scrolling one unified viewport within a larger 
"document" (which isn't nearly as practical).

By comparison, the GitHub and Gitlab side-by-side diffs both fall 
squarely into "cute little trick" territory rather than 
"professional-grade software". Granted, GitHub and Gitlab pretty much 
have their hands tied on the matter: It would likely be rather 
difficult, if realistically possible, to make it work right given their 
constraints. But that's the price they pay for clinging to HTML as their 
one and only UI.


>> Although a native, no-HTML version of github would let
>> them leapfrog years in R&D over their web interface, but oh well.
>
> They do have that, although I have never used it:
>
> OS X: https://mac.github.com/
> Windows: https://windows.github.com/
>

No, I've tried those. Disappointingly, they're not *at all* what they 
sound like.

You've seen that "Clone via GitHub for Windows" button in every GitHub 
repo? *That* is pretty much what the whole thing is all about.

JavaScript doesn't give them a way to invoke "git clone ..." on the 
client's computer, so they made a "program" to let them do it and 
claimed it was "GitHub on the desktop" (which really isn't true at all). 
And from what I can tell, it was never even *intended* to be any sort of 
alternative to the web interface, despite what it sounds like.

They're really nothing more than ordinary Git clients, like TortoiseGit 
or even "Git GUI", except straitjacketed and not particularly useful. 
Pretty much anything that GitHub's web interface provides, is still 
*expected* to be done via the web interface. "GitHub for Win/Mac" 
doesn't even attempt to provide access to most (any?) of those features.

Again, it's mainly just intended to be a way for "dummies" to clone a 
GitHub repo. It's a glorified GUI wrapper for "git clone 
[protocol]:github.com/[repo]" and a few other trivial things.