Source control. There are so many ways to save your stuff, which is great! Until your company uses source control that doesnât have a feature you like to use.
TortoiseGIT allows you to go back and see the revisions for each file and compare them, which makes it easy to see the line changes and maybe why the application isnât running right anymore. This is the âShow Logâ option and has saved my bacon a few times.
It is a âright click kidâ rather than a full on UI with visible space on your desktop. I like that it has a small footprint on my PC and that it is on the right click list with Notepad++ (also a definite favorite because I can tailor my view for specific code like HTML, XML, or C#).
Atlassianâs Source Tree used to be pretty great in versions 1.x.
Alas, since the update to the 2.x version mid-2017, my Source Tree really lags and my global gitignore file doesnât actually ignore files anymore.
This is a major pain when trying to avoid committing all dll, pdb, and txt files in an application that holds a massive website.
I do really like the Git Flow process for teams. Creating branches and hotfixes automatically is pretty awesome.
And finally, the GIT GUI tool. This one is easy to use but it has limited features, so it works best when you are a lone programmer on a project that you will always commit every change. There are hotkeys but I tend to forget them so I use the GUI buttons.
One major drawback is it is difficult to cherry pick changes to commit unless unversioned. Letâs say I made changes to the global.ascx and 6 class files with details regarding my local setup and I donât want to commit them. There isnât a right click function using this GUI so your choices are the hotkeys found in the âcommitâ menu drop down. There isnât a hotkey that Iâve found that allows you to cherry pick
multiple files to stage. All files move to staged when you click âstage changedâ.
You can click the icon next to the file to move 1 file at a time but if you have a lot of files to send or not send, it gets tedious.
This is where I move over to use my Source Tree tool to cherry pick files quickly and easily. Just make sure you give it plenty of time to warm up before you try moving files đ
A final note for GIT GUI
When pinning to your taskbar, make sure you pin the GIT GUI directly, rather than the task icon that opens the repo. If you right click this tool, it has an app called Wish that is available. I do not know what it is for, nor have I tried to use it. Let me know if you know what this thing does! đ The icon you want to click to quick open from the task bar is circled (badly) in red.
