VoxBlog

April 5, 2024

I just heard about GitButler from a Discord friend.

I’m kind of ripe for toying with Git clients I use, as I just switched to GitHub Desktop. I don’t regret the switch, but I don’t love GitHub Desktop so much I couldn’t imagine another switch. Little stuff bugs me.

GitButler is free (the FAQ makes it seem like forever) so I figured it was worth a shot. I actually quite like the idea of an AI helper for generating commit messages. I’m horribly lazy with commit messages and that alone seems like an actually useful application of AI generated text.

I should have read a bit more though, because the GitButler approach is super weird. I had started using it and making a few commits (the generated commit messages were pretty good), but then I go to make a PR, but my changes aren’t on the branch I originally created for the thing I was working on. I was super weirded out and kind of panicked. Where the hell are my changes?

That’s what I mean I should have looked more into the approach. Like the product video says, with GitButler “you don’t need to create branches, delete branches, switch branches, etc”. GitButler does make branches, but it just automatically does it behind the scenes. I think the big idea is that you can have a bunch of unstaged changes, and then essentially drag and drop them into different branches without worrying about doing the whole stash-and-move dance. Fair enough, I do find that dance rather annoying.

Perhaps I could get used to how it works, but for now, I’m just too weirded out by it and had to bail. I feel like there has gotta be a way to be more helpful with this kind of workflow without freaking me out with “virtual branches” and whatnot.

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